Kim Gerdes

Word Order in German: A Formal Dependency Grammar Using a Topological Hierarchy

This paper proposes a description of German word order including phenomena considered as complex, such as scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and verbal pied piping. Our description relates a syntactic dependency structure directly to a topological hierarchy without resorting to movement or similar mechanisms.

Dependency Annotation Choices : Assessing Theoretical and Practical Issues of Universal Dependencies

This article attempts to place dependency annotation options on a solid theoretical and applied footing. By verifying the validity of some basic choices of the current dependency reference framework, Universal Dependencies (UD), in a perspective of general annotation principles, we show how some choices can lead to inconsistencies and discontinuities, partly due to UD’s alternation between syntax and semantics. For some constructions, we propose better suited alternative structures with a clear-cut distinction of syntax and semantics. We propose a classification of conception-oriented, annotatororiented, and finally, treebank end-useroriented considerations to be used in the creation of new annotation schemes.

Tree Unification Grammar Problems and Proposals for Topology, TAG, and German

This work presents a lexicalized grammar formalism which can be seen as a variant of multi-component tree adjoining grammar (TAG). This formalism is well-suited for describing the syntax of German because it relates a syntactic dependency graph with a hierarchy of topological domains. The topological phrase structure encodes the placement of verbal and nominal elements in the (ordered) field structure, just as in the classical topological analysis of the German sentence. This module constitutes an intermediate step between the semantic and the prosodic representations of the sentence and allows deriving cases of scrambling that are problematic for classical TAGs and for some phrase structure based formalisms.