A phrase structure approach to argument cluster coordination

Abstract

It has often been argued that Non-Constituent Coordinations involve ellipsis. Focussing in this paper on so-called 'Argument Cluster Coordination', we provide empirical evidence drawn from French against such elliptical analyses. We then sketch an alternative approach within HPSG, allowing non-standard constituents to be conjoined in the scope of some shared predicate. While such non-standard constituents are generally obtained by relaxing phrase structure, we propose analyzing them as non-headed constructions, deriving their unusual properties from the interplay of two different sets of constraints: those imposed by coordination and those imposed by predicates that select such clusters as arguments.

Distinguishing the Types of Coordinated Verbs with a Shared Argument by Means of New ZeugBERT Language Model and ZeugmaDataset

“…In the classification of the coordComArg class, the model struggled most with coordinations where the complement of both verbs took place in the left-hand context, in 25.6% of cases, see Example (17). The misclassification here is probably caused by low frequency of such configurations in the dataset.…”

“…This paper presents a new linguistic model, ZeugBERT, developed specifically for the sentence analysis of coordinated verbal phrases with a (possible) shared argument. Previous approaches solved this task by rule-based techniques [17,1]. ZeugBERT is designed to solve the classification task of distinguishing sentences with coordinated verbal phrases into three classes: 1) coordination of verbal phrases that do not share a constituent (coordSent), 2) coordination of verbal phrases with a shared argument (coordComArg), and 3) coordination of verbal phrases with a shared argument that crosses the argument structure for both verbs, the rhetorical concept called zeugma (coordZeug class).…”