Predicate Catenae: A Dependency Grammar Analysis of It-Clefts

What it is about

An it-cleft such as "It was herself that Susan critiqued" has two finite verbs, yet the reflexive in the matrix clause is licensed by "Susan" in the embedded clause. This is the connectivity effect. The paper explains it in dependency syntax. The matrix predicate is a catena (a connected, possibly discontinuous word group in the tree) that reaches down from the copula was into the embedded clause, up to the content verb critiqued. The foregrounded phrase is then a co-argument of the embedded predicate, so the usual argument-ranking rule (subject above first object above second object above oblique) licenses the reflexive. The paper checks the pattern against Conditions A, B and C of binding theory, against topicalization, against negative polarity items and quantifier scope, and it notes that a verb phrase or a predicative adjective cannot be the focus of a cleft. No corpus and no counts are used; the argument rests on constructed examples taken from the literature.

Ideas

• I1. Catena units in en/src/parse.rs: after parsing, compute the catena of each predicate (the connected set of words under its dependencies, allowed to be discontinuous) and store it as a BTreeSet of token ids. Use catenae for the frames in prag instead of single words, and check the output on the school texts.
• I2. Argument-ranking antecedent rule for reflexives in coref/src/sieve.rs: a reflexive takes as antecedent a co-argument that ranks higher (subject, first object, second object, oblique). Write this as an ordered rule, and measure coref F1 on the held-out set with the reflexive cases only.
• I3. Cleft detection as a pattern over trees: "It be X that/who ..." with X as the foregrounded argument. Label these and check that the frame reader puts X in the embedded clause's argument slot, not in the matrix clause.
• I4. A golden test set of binding minimal pairs (the paper's Condition A, B and C sets, plus cleft and topicalized variants). The coref and frames code must accept the grammatical forms and reject the starred ones. Add a negative control with the argument ranking reversed, which must fail.
• I5. Rejection rule: the foregrounded part of a cleft cannot be a verb phrase or a predicative adjective. Add it as a check in the frames reader, and count how many school sentences it blocks.

For Mova

The chapter is 35. Reference and coreference (reflexives, binding, the ranking rule), with 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (clefts, topicalization) and 25. Relative clauses (the who in the cleft). Code: coref/src/sieve.rs and mention.rs (antecedent ranking), en/src/parse.rs (catena computation), prag/src/frames.rs (cleft and argument slots). Measure: coref F1 on reflexives, accuracy of the golden binding set, run twice for determinism, with the reversed-ranking control.

Topics: Dependency parsing

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w19-7706

@inproceedings{osborne2019predicate,
  title = {{Predicate Catenae: A Dependency Grammar Analysis of It-Clefts}},
  author = {Osborne, Timothy},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2019)},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w19-7706},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-7706}
}

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