expl: expletive
The expl 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.
In Slovene treebanks, this relation is mostly used for the clitic forms of the reflexive pronoun se (se, si; ‘oneself’) attached to inherently reflexive verbs, i.e. verbs that that cannot occur without se (e.g. oddahniti si/se ‘to be relieved’) or change the meaning when they do (e.g. dati se ‘can, be able to’ vs. dati ‘to give’). This also holds for the reflexive se occurring as a voice marker in passive constructions (e.g. se reče ‘is said’).
If, on the other hand, the reflexive functions as a nominal with a clearly identifiable semantic role, it is analyzed as direct (obj) or indirect (iobj) object.
Vse so se veselo smejale . \n All-of-them they-aux-PAST REFLEX happily laughed .
expl(smejale,se)
expl(laughed,REFLEX)
Pogosto se omenja planinski turizem . \n Often REFLEX mentions alpine tourism .
expl(omenja,se)
expl(mentions,REFLEX)
In addition to the reflexive pronoun, the expl relation is also used with accusative clitic forms of the personal pronouns ga ‘him’ and jo ‘her’ in verbal idiomatic expressions like in the examples below, where the pronoun lies outside the predicate-argument structure.
Celo noč so ga žurali . \n All night they-aux-PAST him-CLITIC partied .
expl(žurali,ga)
expl(partied,him-CLITIC)
Zagodla jim jo je bolezen . \n Ruined-their-plans them her-CLITIC aux-PAST illness .
expl(Zagodla,jo)
expl(Ruined-their-plans,her-CLITIC)
This relation is also applied to genitive pronouns in cases where the pronoun and subject refer to the same participant. This often happens in negated sentences.
Je ni substance pri kateri bi bila raziskovalna dejavnost tako silovita . \n She-GEN does-not-exist substance for which would be research activities so vigorous .
expl(ni,Je)
nsubj(ni,substance-3)
expl(does-not-exist,She-GEN)
nsubj(does-not-exist,substance-16)
expl in other languages: [bg] [de] [el] [en] [fr] [fro] [gsw] [it] [no] [pt] [qpm] [ro] [ru] [sl] [sv] [u] [yue]