The Scope and the Sources of Variation in Verbal Predicates in English and French
Tanja Samardżić, Lonneke van der Plas, Goljihan Kashaeva, Paola Merlo · DSpace repository (University of Tartu) · 2010
In this article, we examine the variation of the predicate-argument structure between English and French in an experimental and data-driven approach. We annotate a corpus of 1000 French sentences with predicate-argument structure using a framework originally developed for English. We identify a number of non-matching predicates and examine them in a qualitative analysis. We show that these two languages do not differ substantially in the inventory and the nature of verbal predicates, even though certain general grammatical properties may result in some variation at this level of representation. We argue that the proposed comparative study can provide a basis for identifying the level of specificity needed for developing a framework for multilingual annotation of predicate-argument structure. 1