ErgSemantics_ForeignExpressions

ESD Test Suite Examples

Abrams said ¦i j'adore la neige i¦.

Linguistic Characterization

Naturally occurring English text will sometimes include strings of foreign words. These can be relatively recent borrowings that haven't been fully assimilated into English or they could be items in quotes as in the testsuite example. In standard orthography, italics are used to represent the fact that the string is not English (and not intended to be read as such). The ERG does not attempt to assign any linguistically motivated syntactic or semantic internal structure to foreign word sequences. Rather, they are represented with a subgraph which can then integrated into the larger MRS structure.

Motivating Examples

• Would be nice to give some examples of different ways that they fit in.

ERS Fingerprints

  h0:fw_seq[ARG1 i1, ARG2 i2]
  h0:[ARG0 i1]
  h0:[ARG0 i2]

Interactions

Reflections

Open Questions

• In the proposed testsuite example the label of the fw_seq EPs is shared not only with all of the components of the FW sequence but also with the verb's EP _say_v_1. I think this is required to make the MRS a graph, and this, too, should be explained somewhere.

Grammar Version

• 1212, forward-looking argument labels (ARG1, ARG2 rather than L-INDEX, R-INDEX)

More Information

• ErgSemantics main page

• Inventory of semantic phenomena (to be) documented

• How to cite this work