Where Should Annotation Stop
Geoffrey R Sampson · 2000
The paper asks how much structural detail it is reasonable to include in a detailed general-purpose grammar annotation scheme. I argue that there is no principled answer to that question; even grammatical distinctions which in general are clear and linguistically central will often be “distinctions without a difference ” in particular examples. The discipline which offers the closest intellectual precedent for linguistic treebank-compilation activity, biological systematics, is disanalogous from our work in that respect. * Detailed v. skeleton analytic schemes Any scheme for structural annotation of corpora must embody decisions about how much detail to include. Some groups explicitly aim at “skeleton parsing”, marking much less grammatical detail than linguists recognize a language as containing. In many circumstances, this will be a sensible