ErgSemantics_ForeignExpressions

ESD Test Suite Examples

Abrams said, “¦i le chien? i¦”

Linguistic Characterization

Naturally occurring English text will sometimes include strings of foreign words. These can be relatively recent borrowings that haven't been fully assimilated into English or they could be items in quotes as in the testsuite example. In standard orthography, italics are used to represent the fact that the string is not English (and not intended to be read as such). The ERG does not attempt to assign any linguistically motivated syntactic or semantic internal structure to foreign word sequences. Rather, they are represented with a subgraph which can then integrated into the larger MRS structure.

Motivating Examples

• Would be nice to give some examples of different ways that they fit in.

MRS Fingerprints

This is what I think the fingerprints should be under the current analysis, but I can't find an example that actually illustrates it: [NB: abusing/extending the wild card notation here.]

h0:compound(ARG1 x1, ARG2, x2)
h0:_/fw_u_unknown(ARG0 x1)
_/fw_u_unknown(ARG0 x2)

... in particular the example proposed above actually gets _chien/nn_u_unknown for chien rather than the expected _chien/fw_u_unknown.

Interactions

Reflections

Open Questions

• Original testsuite example is broken (Abrams said, “¦i Kiun libron vi volas? i¦”), since vi gets analyzed as card ... is that intended?

• Abrams said, “¦i Et tu Brute? i¦” isn't any better either, since Et and Brute both get the proper noun treatment.

• What does the ERG do with words like ad hoc that it does recognize when they appear in italics: treated as fw.

• What happened to fw_seq? Is compound really a better representation?

Grammar Version

• 1212

More Information

• ErgSemantics main page

• Inventory of semantic phenomena (to be) documented

• How to cite this work