Nonprototypical Predication and Nonpredicational Clauses in Universal Dependencies

Abstract

To assess whether the framework of Universal Dependencies (UD) is compatible with findings from linguistic typology, we need to systematically review how UD represents linguistic constructions and how it handles the range of morphosyntactic variation attested across languages. In this paper, we present such a review focusing on nonprototypical predication and nonpredicational clauses. We find that, while nonprototypical predication is generally handled well in the UD framework, nonpredicational clauses are not discussed as such in the guidelines and often have to be annotated in a way that does not reflect their special information packaging functions. We briefly discuss ways in which the UD framework could be extended in order to better capture these functions.

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