Dependency Trees for Greenlandic
Eckhard Bick · University of Southern Denmark Research Portal (University of Southern Denmark) · 2019
This paper presents a descriptive system for dependency structures in Greenlandic and proposes a method for implementing it using Constraint Grammar (CG) rules.Our approach aims at reconciling traditional dependency syntax with the polysynthetic morphology of Greenlandic by introducing a novel, morphologically informed tokenization model.For instance, verb-incorporated nominal arguments and adverbials are treated as clause-level constituents rather than morphemes.We discuss and evaluate our alternative tokenization in a crosslanguage perspective, arguing that the method allows the construction of more universal dependency trees, facilitating both lexical and syntactic transfer in a machine translation (MT) context.