This is part of archived UD v1 documentation. See http://universaldependencies.org/ for the current version.
home issue tracker

Syntax: General Principles

This document is a placeholder for the language-specific overview of guidelines for syntactic annotation.

(note: some additional documentation-related material is for the time found in extra.html)

Unused UD dependency relations

Some dependency types defined by the general UD dependency annotation guidelines are not applied in UD Finnish as the phenomenon they are intended to annotate does not occur in Finnish. Specifically, the following UD dependency relations are not applied in UD Finnish:

Finnish existential clauses do not contain an expletive there, nor do passive clauses have a subject. What is considered the passive subject in e.g. English is the direct object in Finnish, and thus the corresponding type, dobj is used instead, or in the case of a clause acting as the direct object, it is marked as a clausal complement (ccomp). Finally, indirect objects do not occur in Finnish, as regardless of word order, the corresponding argument is expressed by a nominal modifier (nmod).

New dependency relations

There are also dependency types that are specific to the UD Finnish scheme.

The dependency types nmod:gsubj and nmod:gobj were added to accommodate the frequent constructions of nouns that take a subject- or object-like argument. The genitive subject and object take the form of a genitive modifier, and thus they are subtypes of nmod:poss.

The nominal and clausal subject types have received a new subtype each, nsubj:cop and csubj:cop, respectively, to be used for subjects of copular clauses. These two new types come in place of the passive subject types that are, as explained above, not applied in UD Finnish.

We have introduced one new subtype for open clausal complements (xcomp): clausal complement with different subject, xcomp:ds. This is to distinguish which of the sentence elements is inherited from the higher clause.


Differences to TDT

UD Finnish annotation differs in a number of ways from the Turku Dependency Treebank annotation. This section documents these differences.

(Please note: this part of the documentation is a work in progress.)

Dependency type mapping

The following table provides a mapping from TDT dependency type labels to (nearly) corresponding UD Finnish labels. (See also issue #64.)

TDT UD Finnish Notes
acomp xcomp  
adpos case  
compar advcl  
comparator mark  
complm mark Removed distinction
csubj-cop csubj:cop  
gobj nmod:gobj  
gsubj nmod:gsubj  
iccomp xcomp:ds  
infmod acl  
intj discourse  
nn compound:nn  
nommod nmod  
nommod-own nmod:own  
nsubj-cop nsubj:cop  
num nummod  
number compound Removed distinction
partmod acl  
poss nmod:poss  
preconj cc:preconj  
prt compound:prt  
quantmod advmod  
rcmod acl:relcl  
rel (multiple) See below
voc vocative  

The TDT dependency type rel is not mapped to any single UD type. Instead we use any normal dependency relation to catch the syntactic function of the relativizer (for example nsubj or dobj).

Additionally, the following dependency relations cannot be directly created by mapping existing TDT annotations and may thus not occur in the TDT-derived UD Finnish corpus: