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expl: expletive

This relation captures expletive or pleonastic nominals. These are nominals that appear in an argument position of a predicate but which do not themselves satisfy any of the semantic roles of the predicate. There is further discussion and examples on the universal dependency page (u-dep/expl).

C' est la seule manière de réussir \n It' s the only way to succeed
expl(manière, C')

In Romance languages, pronouns in prominal verbs which do not have a semantic role are marked as expl such as se in se douter. In French the expl relation is also used for euphonic elements, such as l’ in e.g. et que l’on retrouve or t in a-t-il reçu mon email?

Note that currenlty expletives are not annotated consistently in the French treebank.


Treebank Statistics (UD_French)

This relation is universal.

735 nodes (0%) are attached to their parents as expl.

651 instances of expl (89%) are right-to-left (child precedes parent). Average distance between parent and child is 1.37687074829932.

The following 21 pairs of parts of speech are connected with expl: fr-pos/VERB-fr-pos/PRON (298; 41% instances), fr-pos/PRON-fr-pos/PART (244; 33% instances), fr-pos/PRON-fr-pos/PRON (54; 7% instances), fr-pos/VERB-fr-pos/SCONJ (46; 6% instances), fr-pos/PROPN-fr-pos/ADP (24; 3% instances), fr-pos/NOUN-fr-pos/PRON (16; 2% instances), fr-pos/NOUN-fr-pos/ADP (11; 1% instances), fr-pos/ADJ-fr-pos/ADP (8; 1% instances), fr-pos/ADJ-fr-pos/PRON (8; 1% instances), fr-pos/NOUN-fr-pos/SCONJ (7; 1% instances), fr-pos/ADJ-fr-pos/SCONJ (5; 1% instances), fr-pos/VERB-fr-pos/ADP (3; 0% instances), fr-pos/ADV-fr-pos/PRON (2; 0% instances), fr-pos/AUX-fr-pos/PRON (2; 0% instances), fr-pos/ADV-fr-pos/ADP (1; 0% instances), fr-pos/ADV-fr-pos/SCONJ (1; 0% instances), fr-pos/NUM-fr-pos/ADP (1; 0% instances), fr-pos/NUM-fr-pos/PRON (1; 0% instances), fr-pos/PRON-fr-pos/ADP (1; 0% instances), fr-pos/PROPN-fr-pos/PRON (1; 0% instances), fr-pos/VERB-fr-pos/PART (1; 0% instances).

# visual-style 9	bgColor:blue
# visual-style 9	fgColor:white
# visual-style 10	bgColor:blue
# visual-style 10	fgColor:white
# visual-style 10 9 expl	color:blue
1	Il	il	PRON	_	Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	nsubj	_	_
2	n'	ne	PART	_	_	6	neg	_	_
3	est	être	VERB	_	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	cop	_	_
4	pas	pas	ADV	_	_	6	neg	_	_
5	aussi	aussi	ADV	_	_	6	advmod	_	_
6	anxieux	anxieux	ADJ	_	Gender=Masc|Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
7	qu'	que	SCONJ	_	_	10	mark	_	_
8	il	il	PRON	_	Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	10	nsubj	_	_
9	y	y	PRON	_	_	10	expl	_	_
10	paraît	paraître	VERB	_	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	advcl	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	_	_	6	punct	_	_

# visual-style 2	bgColor:blue
# visual-style 2	fgColor:white
# visual-style 3	bgColor:blue
# visual-style 3	fgColor:white
# visual-style 3 2 expl	color:blue
1	Va	aller	VERB	_	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
2	-t	t	PART	_	_	3	expl	_	_
3	-il	il	PRON	_	Gender=Masc|Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Prs	1	nsubj	_	_
4	se	se	PRON	_	Person=3|PronType=Prs	5	dobj	_	_
5	circonscrire	circonscrire	VERB	_	VerbForm=Inf	1	xcomp	_	_
6	à	à	ADP	_	_	9	case	_	_
7	cette	ce	DET	_	Gender=Fem|Number=Sing|PronType=Dem	9	det	_	_
8	seule	seul	ADJ	_	Gender=Fem|Number=Sing	9	amod	_	_
9	matière	matière	NOUN	_	Gender=Fem|Number=Sing	5	nmod	_	_
10	?	?	PUNCT	_	_	1	punct	_	_

# visual-style 3	bgColor:blue
# visual-style 3	fgColor:white
# visual-style 1	bgColor:blue
# visual-style 1	fgColor:white
# visual-style 1 3 expl	color:blue
1	Qu'	que	PRON	_	_	0	root	_	_
2	est	être	VERB	_	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	1	cop	_	_
3	-ce	ce	PRON	_	Number=Sing|Person=3|PronType=Dem	1	expl	_	_
4	qui	qui	PRON	_	_	3	mwe	_	_
5	va	aller	AUX	_	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	6	aux	_	_
6	augmenter	augmenter	VERB	_	VerbForm=Inf	3	acl:relcl	_	_
7	?	?	PUNCT	_	_	1	punct	_	_


expl in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]