Dependency Syntax. An Introduction

Leonid IomdinInstitute for Information Transmission

Problems,Russian Academy of Sciences

[email protected], [email protected]

Program Overview: p. 11. Basic Principles of The Meaning-Text

theory by Igor Mel’čuk. Language as a Universal Translator of Senses to Texts and Texts to Senses. Text analysis and text generation. The theory of integral linguistic description by Juri Apresjan. The grammar and the dictionary of language.

2. Two syntactic levels of sentence representation: surface syntax and deep syntax.

2November 20, 2009. Lecture 1

Program Overview: p. 23. The dependency tree structure as a syntactic

representation of the sentence. Dependency tree vs. Constituent tree: advantages and drawbacks of both types of representation. Limits of the dependency tree. The hypothesis of two syntactic starts.

4. The notions of syntactic relation. Major classes of syntactic relations: actant, attributive, coordinative and auxiliary relation classes.

5. The notion of syntactic feature. Syntactic features vs. Semantic features.


Program Overview: p. 36. Actants and valencies. Active, passive and distant

valencies. The government pattern of a dictionary entry. An overview of actant syntactic relations. The predicative relation. The agentive relation. Completive relations.

7. An overview of attributive syntactic relations. Grammatical Agreement. Numerals and Quantitative Constructions. The system of Quantification Syntax of Russian.

8. Grammatical coordination as a type of grammatical subordination. An overview of coordinative syntactic relations.


Program Overview: p. 49. Auxiliary syntactic relations. Analytical

grammatical forms as an object of syntax. 10 Microsyntax of Language. Minor Type

Sentences. Syntactic Idioms.11. Lexical Functions in the Dictionary and

the Grammar. 12. Syntactic description and syntactic rules.

Dependency Syntax in NLP. Dependency Syntax in Machine Translation. Syntactically Tagged Corpus of Texts.


Selected Bibliography: p. 1Mel'čuk, I. A (1970). Towards a functioning

model of language. In M. Bierwisch & K. E. Heidolph (Eds.), Progress in linguistics, 198 - 207. The Hague: Mouton.

Mel'čuk, I. A , & Pertsov, N. V. (1987). Surface syntax of English: A formal model within the Meaning-Text framework. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Mel'čuk, I. A (1988). Dependency syntax: Theory and practice. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.


Selected Bibliography: p. 2Dependency in Linguistic Description (2009).

Edited by Alain Polguère and Igor A. Mel’čuk (eds.). University of Montreal. Studies in Language Companion Series 111. xxii, 281 pp. John Benjamins.

Jury D. Apresjan. Lexical Semantics. A Guide to Russian Vocabulary. Ann-Arbor, Karoma Publishers, 1992, 633 pp.


Selected Bibliography: p. 3Jury D. Apresjan, Igor M. Boguslavsky, Leonid

L. Iomdin, Leonid L. Tsinman). Lexical Functions in Actual NLP-Applications // Selected Lexical and Grammatical Issues in the Meaning–Text Theory. In honour of Igor Mel'čuk. (Ed. by Leo Wanner). John Benjamins, Studies in Language Companion. Series 84. ISBN 978 90 272 3094 2. 2007. Р. 199-230.


Selected Bibliography: p. 4Leonid L. Iomdin. Russian Idioms Formed with

Interrogative Pronouns and their Syntactic Properties // Meaning – Text Theory 2007. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Meaning – Text Theory. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. Sonderband 69. ISSN 0258-6835. ISBN 978-3-87690-xxx-x. München – Wien, 2007. S. 179-189.


Selected Bibliography: p. 5Leonid L. Iomdin. A Few Lessons Learned from

Rule-Based Machine Translation // Linguistics, Computer Science and Language Processing. Festschrift for Franz Guenthner on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday. Gaston Gross, Klaus S. Schulz (eds.) College Publications. ISBN-13: 978-1904987802. München, 2008. P. 145-160.


November 20, 2009. Lecture 1 11








Sense is a construct, an artificial representation in a specially designed semantic language



Direction of Conversion as Performed by the language

•Text Analysis•Text Synthesis, or Text Generation

According to Igor Mel’čuk, synthesis is of primary character


Stratificational Approach


Linguistic Disciplines








Linguistic Sublevels


Linguistic Sublevels


An integrated description of language according to Jury Apresjan: an ideal match between the dictionary and the grammar

The Grammar and the Dictionary

Semantic Representation (SemR) of an Utterance in the Meaning Text Model


The Food and Drug Administration has seriously cautioned expectant mothers to avoid one of life’s simple pleasures: a cup of coffee

is synonymous withPregnant women have been strongly

warned by the FDA against drinking coffee, one of the small pleasures of life

Semantic Representation (SemR) of an Utterance in the Meaning Text Model


Mel'čuk, I. A , & Pertsov, N. V. (1987).

Deep Syntactic Representation (DSyntR) of a Sentence



Surface Syntactic Representation (SSyntR) of a Sentence



Surface Syntactic Representation (SSyntR) of a Sentence in ETAP-3



Surface Syntaxis the main linguistic discipline to

which this course is devoted: conversion between deep morphological representation and surface syntactic representation


Meaning Text Theory and Computer Applications. Machine Translation

Natural Dialogue vs. Translation


Next lectureClasses of Syntactic Relations.

Actantial Syntactic Relations


Dependency Syntax. An Introduction

Documents

syntactic representation

syntactic description

syntactic features

dependency syntax

syntactic rules

syntactic starts

syntactic idioms

auxiliary syntactic