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This page pertains to UD version 2.

Universal Dependency Relations

The following table lists the 37 universal syntactic relations used in UD v2. It is a revised version of the relations originally described in Universal Stanford Dependencies: A cross-linguistic typology (de Marneffe et al. 2014).

The upper part of the table follows the main organizing principles of the UD taxonomy such that rows correspond to functional categories in relation to the head (core arguments of clausal predicates, non-core dependents of clausal predicates, and dependents of nominals) while columns correspond to structural categories of the dependent (nominals, clauses, modifier words, function words). The lower part of the table lists relations that are not dependency relations in the narrow sense.

Nominals
Clauses
Modifier words
Function Words
Core arguments
nsubj
obj
iobj
csubj
ccomp
xcomp
Non-core dependents
obl
vocative
expl
dislocated
advcl
advmod*
discourse
aux
cop
mark
Nominal dependents
nmod
appos
nummod
acl
amod
det
clf
case
Coordination
Headless
Loose
Special
Other
conj
cc
fixed
flat
list
parataxis
compound
orphan
goeswith
reparandum
punct
root
dep

* The advmod relation is used for modifiers not only of predicates but also of other modifier words.

Individual languages may define more specific relations as subtypes of the universal types defined here. A subtyped relation always starts with the basic type, followed by a colon and the subtype string. In general, subtypes are language-specific and optional. However, some subtypes are assumed to apply to many languages and they should be considered semi-mandatory: If the language has the phenomenon that the subtype focuses on, then the subtype should be used. The following subtypes currently have the semi-mandatory status:

The enhanced dependency representation defines further extensions of the dependency types.


Alphabetical listing