orphan: orphan in ellipsis
The orphan relation is used to provide a satisfactory treatment of certain instances of
ellipsis where simple promotion would result in unnatural and misleading dependency relation (in the case of gapping and stripping, where a predicational or verbal
head gets elided).
Դավիթը սուրճ խմեց , իսկ Մերին ՝ թեյ ։ \n David drank coffee and Mary - tea .
nsubj(խմեց, Դավիթը)
nsubj(drank, David)
obj(խմեց, սուրճ)
obj(drank, coffee)
conj(խմեց, Մերին)
conj(drank, Mary)
orphan(Մերին, թեյ)
orphan(Mary, tea)
cc(Մերին, իսկ)
cc(Mary, and)
In this example, the subject Մերին “Mary” is promoted to the head position in the second conjunct. Attaching the object թեյ “tea” to the subject is necessary to preserve the integrity of the clause, but using the standard relation obj would be misleading because թեյ “tea” is not the object of Մերին “Mary”. Therefore, the orphan relation is used to indicate that this is a non-standard attachment. By contrast, the coordinating conjunction իսկ “and” performs essentially the same function as in the non-elliptical case and therefore retains its normal relation cc.
orphan in other languages: [bm] [cop] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [fi] [fr] [fro] [ga] [gsw] [hy] [it] [kk] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ro] [ru] [sl] [sv] [swl] [tr] [u] [vi] [yue] [zh]