Uppsala Group on Particles and Adpositions
Particles
We discussed the use of the part-of-speech tag PART and the potential need for a new syntactic relation part. We concluded that we probably need to keep the part-of-speech tag PART, because several languages contain particles that don’t fit into any of the other categories. In order to know this for sure, we should make a survey of what the PART category is currently used for in existing treebanks. On the other hand, we concluded that we should not introduce a new relation part, since this is not a well-defined syntactic relation. However, we do need a better analysis of question particles, preferably in a way that parallels the analysis of negation.
Adpositions
We went through the inconsistencies in the syntactic function of adpositions identified by Dan Zeman. In the case of Spanish and German, it seems to be a case of obsolete conversions, failing to reflect the new guidelines for infinitive markers and verb particles, respectively. In the remaining cases, we think that all the variants are plausible linguistic structures.