Function Words in Praguian Functional Generative Description

• Jarmila Panvová ^[1] ; Eva Hajicová ; Marie Mikulová ; Jan Hajic
  1. [1] Charles University in Prague

     Charles University in Prague

     Chequia

     
• Localización: Linguistic Analysis, ISSN 0098-9053, Vol. 43, Nº. 3-4, 2024, págs. 465-512
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The present contribution is aimed at a complex description of the treatment of the so-called function words within the framework of a dependency-based Functional Generative Description as proposed in Prague by Petr Sgall and his team and its reflection in the Prague Dependency Treebank, an original annotated corpus of Czech. Both the framework and the treebank are based on a stratificational model of language, a part of which are two levels of dependency-based syntactic structure, one oriented towards the syntactic structure of the sentence on the surface layer called analytical and the other oriented towards the underlying, deep sentence structure called tectogrammatical. The dependency tree structure of the sentence on the analytical level contains all the words present in the sentence as separate nodes, while the dependency representation of a sentence on the tectogrammatical level conceived of as a linguistically structured meaning of the sentence contains only content words as its nodes. On the analytical level, a distinction is made between different classes of function words, the main boundary being between the function words that function within verbal complexes and which contain information about the morpho-syntactic properties of verbs (i.e., auxiliaries), and those being parts of nominal groups (prepositions) or connecting clauses (or, as the case may be, parts of clauses) into one whole (conjunctions). It is argued in this article that auxiliaries should be considered to be dependents on the verb that is their governor and to which they ‟belong,” and that the prepositions and conjunctions, on the contrary, should be considered to be the heads of the nouns or clauses whose form they “govern” or “control.” On the tectogrammatical level, the semantic contribution of the func- tion words to the meaning of the sentence is reflected by information attached to the nodes of the tectogrammatical tree in the form of complex labels. Auxiliaries, prepositions and conjunctions are the most evident classes of function words, though there are some groups of words such as particles that are located on the borderline between function words and content words, to which we also pay attention in this study.