Dependencies containing a lexical relation

To symplify some linguistic analyses, DepPattern also allows to define dependencies between two words (a head and a dependent) where the syntactic relation between them is lexicalized. In this cases, there is a third gramatical word used as dependency relator. For instance, we can consider that the expression "man with glasses" contains a open-choice dependency between "man" and "glasses" marked by prepostion "with", which is here a kind of binary relator. Obviously, such an expression can also be represented in a more standard way, by means of two basic dependencies (``with'' and ``glasses'', ``man'' and ``with''). Likewise, the expression ``if it rains, I go'' can contain an open-choice dependency between ``rains'' and ``go'', linked by the conjunction ``if''. These are called complex open-choice dependencies.

It would be possible to also find examples of complex lexical dependencies. For instance, ``have to eat'' could be analysed as an idiomatic dependency between ``have'' and ``eat'', related by means of particle ``to''. However, these dependency types are not implemented in the current version of the DepPattern compiler.

The types implemented are the following complex open-choice dependencies:

Complex dependencies are, in fact, constituted by single binary dependencies. They can be used as syntactic-semantic short-cuts in order to simplify the analysis.

Pablo Gamallo 2009-09-14