remnant: remnant in ellipsis
The remnant relation is used to provide a satisfactory treatment of ellipsis (in
the case of gapping and stripping, where a predicational or verbal
head gets elided) without having to postulate empty nodes in the basic representation. This is something that was lacking in earlier versions
of SD and provides a basis for being able to reconstruct dependencies
in the enhanced representation of SD.
USD adopts an analysis that notes that in ellipsis a remnant corresponds to a correlate in a preceding clause. The remnant relation connects each remnant to its correlate in the basic dependency representation. This is then a sufficient representation to reconstruct the predicate-argument structure in the enhanced representation.
Even in the more complex example below, the remnant
relations enable us to correctly retrieve the subjects and objects in
the clauses with an elided verb.
Note in particular that (unlike for conj), remnant uses a chaining analysis where each subsequent remnant depends on the immediately preceding remnant/correlate. The reason for this is that otherwise in a sentence with 2 or more chained ellipses the dependency structure would no longer track which remnants go together. It would become impossible to determine whether Mary won silver and Sandy gold, or Mary won gold and Sandy silver.
Instances of stripping typically occur when there is only one argument in the second clause, but with an accompanying adverbial modifier such as not or only. We model these sentences with the remnant relation as well.
Sometimes in these constructions adverbials will be “sprouted”, and have no correlate in the precedeing clause. In such a situation, the adverbial should attach to one of the remnants; in principle it shouldn’t matter which remnant it attaches to, since all remnants at a particular depth of embedding point back to the same semantic event (which the adverbial is a part of). However, to enforce a regular system, the adverbial should depend on the nearest leftmost dependent.
The remnant relation is used when no predicational material is present. In contrast, in right-node-raising (RNR) and VP-ellipsis constructions in which some kind of predicational or verbal material is still present, the remnant relation is not used. In RNR, the verbs are coordinated and the object is a dobj of the first verb:
In VP-ellipsis, we keep the auxiliary as the head, as shown below:
Treebank Statistics (UD_English)
This relation is universal.
96 nodes (0%) are attached to their parents as remnant.
96 instances of remnant (100%) are left-to-right (parent precedes child).
Average distance between parent and child is 5.82291666666667.
The following 23 pairs of parts of speech are connected with remnant: NOUN-NOUN (35; 36% instances), PROPN-PROPN (10; 10% instances), ADJ-ADJ (9; 9% instances), ADV-ADV (7; 7% instances), NUM-NUM (6; 6% instances), VERB-VERB (5; 5% instances), DET-NOUN (3; 3% instances), VERB-NOUN (3; 3% instances), NOUN-ADJ (2; 2% instances), NOUN-NUM (2; 2% instances), NOUN-PROPN (2; 2% instances), ADJ-NOUN (1; 1% instances), ADJ-VERB (1; 1% instances), ADJ-X (1; 1% instances), ADV-PROPN (1; 1% instances), NOUN-ADV (1; 1% instances), NOUN-VERB (1; 1% instances), NUM-DET (1; 1% instances), PART-ADV (1; 1% instances), PRON-ADJ (1; 1% instances), PRON-PRON (1; 1% instances), PUNCT-CONJ (1; 1% instances), VERB-PROPN (1; 1% instances).
remnant in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]