This is part of archived UD v1 documentation. See http://universaldependencies.org/ for the current version.
home no/dep issue tracker

expl: expletive

This relation captures expletive 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. The main predicate of the clause (the verb or predicate adjective or noun) is the governor.

For Norwegian, the expletive element is expressed using the neuter pronoun det “it” and the expl relation is used for both expletive subjects and objects.

Presentational construction

In Norwegian expletives occur in the presentational construction, which involves an expletive subject, an active verb and an indefinite subject (en debatt “a debate” in the example below).

Impersonal passive

Norwegian employs the impersonal passive construction, where there is an expletive subject and the underlying subject is unexpressed.

Clause-anticipating constructions

These constructions contain a finite or non-finite clause which semantically may be regarded as the subject, but where the subject position is occupied by an expletive.

We also find clause-anticipating constructions with expletive objects.

Clefts

Clefts are quite common in Norwegian. They contain an expletive subject, a form of være “to be” and a relative clause. Note that in clefts we do not adopt a copula analysis of the verb være “er”.

References

Kari Kinn, Per Erik Solberg and Pål Kristian Eriksen. NDT Guidelines for Morphological Annotation”. National Library Tech Report.

~~~


Treebank Statistics (UD_Norwegian)

This relation is universal.

3239 nodes (1%) are attached to their parents as expl.

2651 instances of expl (82%) are right-to-left (child precedes parent). Average distance between parent and child is 1.96542142636616.

The following 12 pairs of parts of speech are connected with expl: VERB-PRON (1869; 58% instances), ADJ-PRON (613; 19% instances), NOUN-PRON (495; 15% instances), PRON-PRON (93; 3% instances), ADV-PRON (84; 3% instances), PROPN-PRON (59; 2% instances), DET-PRON (10; 0% instances), VERB-ADV (7; 0% instances), NUM-PRON (4; 0% instances), ADP-PRON (3; 0% instances), CONJ-PRON (1; 0% instances), VERB-DET (1; 0% instances).


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