orphan: orphan in ellipsis
The orphan relation is used to provide a satisfactory treatment of certain instances of
ellipsis
(in the case of gapping and stripping, where a predicational or verbal
head gets elided).
Павел заказал говядину , а Мария свинину . \n Pavel ordered beef and Maria pork .
nsubj(заказал, Павел)
nsubj(ordered, Pavel)
obj(заказал, говядину)
obj(ordered, beef)
conj(Павел, Мария)
conj(Pavel, Maria)
orphan(Мария, свинину)
orphan(Maria, pork)
In this example, the subject Мария “Maria“ is promoted to the head position in the second conjunct. Attaching the object свинину “pork“ to the subject is necessary to preserve the integrity of the clause, but using the standard relation obj would be misleading because pork is not the object of Maria. Therefore, the orphan relation is used to indicate that this is a non-standard attachment. By contrast, the coordinating conjunction а “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] [xcl] [yue] [zh]