Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

tricky light/secondary verb example #59

Open
jakpra opened this issue Apr 21, 2019 · 2 comments
Open

tricky light/secondary verb example #59

jakpra opened this issue Apr 21, 2019 · 2 comments

Comments

@jakpra
Copy link

jakpra commented Apr 21, 2019

For the sentence I follow my father 's trade, I can see the following analyses:

1a) - follow is main predicate, father is Elaborator with remote edge
I_A follow_P [ [ [ my_A father_S ]_A 's_R (trade)_P ]_E trade_C ]_A

1b) - follow is main predicate, father is participant
I_A follow_P [ [ my_A father_S 's_R ]_A trade_P ]_A

    • trade is main predicate, follow is secondary, licensing the additional participant my father
      I_A follow_D [ my_A father_S 's_R ]_A trade_P

I like this the most, even though it fails to express the diachronicity of the father's and my trading.

    • follow trade is LVC and main predicate
      I_A [ follow_F trade_C ]_P ...

What to do with my father in this case? Participant? Or parallel scene with remote edge to (follow) trade?

@nschneid
Copy link
Collaborator

Are there paraphrases to support the notion that 'follow' is a light verb? The paraphrases I can think of involve comparatives ("My trade is the same as my father's") and augmentative constructions ("My father's trade is X, and so is mine"; "My trade is X, which is also my father's").

As you say, the following presumably happens at a different place and time than the original trade, so it doesn't seem to fit the mold for secondary verbs. It's not merely aspectual, but involves some notion of imitation. In "I imitated the cat" and "I imitated the cat's meowing", the imitation event seems pretty well distinct from what the cat does, even if we may infer from the meaning of 'imitate' that it also involves meowing.

Thus I like (1a) or (1b).

There's a separate question of whether annotators could reliably identify "my work/trade/career/..." as scene-evoking, given that it doesn't specify any particular manner of working.

@omriabnd
Copy link
Member

omriabnd commented May 5, 2019 via email

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants