"a few", "a little" #170
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@amir-zeldes any opinions? |
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Well, I agree that from a historical perspective the current analysis is a bit simplistic, but I think it is mainly motivated by a "no better solution" situation: in many ways, it's like "a lot of" but without the "of", so you can't do a normal The fact that "a few" can stand by itself is true, but that doesn't mean it has to have the same analysis. Semantically it is pretty similar to "many", as you say, or also "some" as a quantity expression. I think I could see doing "a <-det few" instead of attaching to the noun, but I would be opposed to
And in general, I would say it's relatively clear "few" outranks "a" as a possible head, so it's not really 'structureless'. The only real question is 'who does the "a" belong to'. The main reasons I would hesitate to change this are:
So I guess it's mainly a question of whether that would make the analysis much better, and I'm not super sure about that. I guess it would be |
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On the view that it's been grammaticalized a compound determiner, it could be But mainly I just want it to be a constituent. Even with rare internal modification (not sure if "a scant few" is a frozen expression or not), consider:
But article+adjective with an elided noun is not possible in general:
So I think this is a good argument for making a+few into a constituent. As is, "a" is attached to "few" only when there is no head noun, so the benefit of changing it would be consistency. |
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It occurs to me that this is similar to article+number expressions like "a hundred", which also permit plural noun ellipsis: I bought a hundred (books). GUM treats "a hundred" as a constituent ( |
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Yes, "a hundred" is pretty natural to treat that way since we need to deal with "one hundred" as well, which has a similar structure. It also doesn't create any friction in terms of labeling 100, since that's still nummod. But that brings me back to my earlier questions: what do you want the deprel of "few" to be? My main hesitation in touching this (aside from it being work) is that I find |
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I agree |
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I think I feel pretty strongly against
As I said above, I think if anything |
Here's CGEL (p. 392):
Really "a few" and "a little" are special constructions that permit very limited internal modification. Maybe UD needs an
I don't have that intuition. I think they act in concert.
But if you think the indefinite article is acting as usual then it's very odd that it's modifying a plural noun, yes? You can't say "a several dogs" or "a many dogs". "A few" is simply a syntactically special expression. |
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I agree it's a special construction, but there are lots of special constructions and we only have very few labels... The same kind of a+plural appears in a number of places, for example "a great many" etc., so it's not quite unique. In any case, it sounds like we agree that it's not quite or only almost fixed, so I think we should take fixed off the table. If that makes sense, then my question remains, what would the deprel be? I think if we change it, few should be the head and "a" should be a dependent as it usually is. |
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I would say the definition fits because we are talking about a headless semi-fixed MWE. It is more grammaticized than names but there's nothing saying that grammaticized expressions cannot be "a good/great many": these are also MWEs acting as quantifiers with special morphosyntax. *a many books, *a very/considerable many books, *a great several books. CGEL p. 394:
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I'd be against
To existing analyses like:
I'm still not sure it's a huge improvement over what we have now, but the idea of "a" heading a |
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So I guess the crux of the question is whether it is a nominalized adjective like "the poor" or "the British". I don't see it that way—yes you could say "the many as opposed to the few" just like "the rich as opposed to the poor", but this strikes me as an entirely different usage from "a few" as in "I bought a few". And note that while you can say "the many as opposed to the few" you cannot say "a many books", so there is something special about "a few" and "a great many". Can the normal nominalized adjective construction be used with an indefinite article? Here are results with indefinite article + ADJ other than "few" or "little", and they look like annotation errors (attachment errors or lexemes with distinct nominal senses that I'd tag as NOUN, e.g. "a contemporary" = 'a person who is around at the same time as someone'), not a productive construction where an adjective is coerced to a nominal. |
"I bought a few"—I'd want that to look similar to "I bought many". This could be achieved with |
Yes, but I'd like "I bought a few" to look similar to "I bought few"... |
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Yeah that would be achieved too with |
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I'm not sure I understood you- are you saying "a few" by itself should also be flat? If so, what about "the few" in "the few I know"? And what would you do about things like:
I think keeping "a" as det to something makes the most sense given the flexibility and potential internal modifications of few. |
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Oooh fun. "A long few days"—hadn't thought about this. I think it's yet another construction ("a" + adjective quality modifier(s) + quantifier): "a tough several days", "an unprecedented very long 8 days". So I would say that in that case "few" is acting as a normal quantifier-adjective, and this construction licenses a special use of "a" but I'm not sure whether to say the quantity adjective itself licenses "a". I.e. it seems like a semiproductive construction where "a" is special but not part of a frozen expression, so UD won't have the capacity to capture it and Note that "a long few days" and "a few long days" parse differently for me, even if they work out to meaning similar things in practice. (cf. a long many days vs. *a many long days) Another few weeks, the next few weeks, etc.—I think here "few" is just a regular quantifier adjective. (cf. another several weeks, the next several weeks) |
"The few I know" fits the definite-article + adjective-coercion-to-nominal construction, so I think that would be Yes, |
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I think "a long few days" and "a few days" is the same "few". I would consider all of the above constructions to contain the article with its normal label of det, and it think it would be the most intuitive and reliable for annotators as well. |
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If "few" works as an adjective in "my very few books", it appears that "a few" works as a determiner in "a few books" because it blocks up the position and prevents any other determiner to appear. So I think that "a few" must be About the internal structure of "a few" you showed that some adjectives are possible so it is possible not to treat "a few" as a fixed expression and to analyse "a" as a I agree with @nschneid that "a long few days" might be a different construction, where "few days" is a unit and not "a long few". |
Oh good point. So "I bought a few books" has ExtPos=DET. What about "I bought a few"—ExtPos=ADJ or DET? Note that "many" is always tagged as ADJ, whereas "some" is always tagged as DET. Both can appear without a head noun: I bought many/some. I guess treating "a few" as DET across the board, like "some", would make sense (the many books / *the a few books / *the some books). Re: "few" acting as a noun...I agree it can do this in some contexts (e.g. with a definite article), but in "a few" it is hard for me to say it is more noun-like than "some" or "many" apart from "a" looking superficially like an article. And a DET MWE with an internal DET feels a bit awkward to me. Seems like the more neutral solution is to say, this is a weird expression that doesn't generalize to words other than "a" + "few/little" + occasionally an internal modifier, and And from a native speaker intuition perspective, I am having trouble conceptualizing "few" and "little" as nouns (as opposed to "lot" or "bit"), except when coerced with a definite article. |
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Let me recap my arguments against flat/fixed:
I agree that there are interesting and subtle differences between the various constructions, but I think an average user would expect these to look similar: I know a few Across these related constructions, "few" can be combined with most normal determiner options, suggesting that the "super-schema" of what they have in common basically calls for one of the standard English determiners (incl. zero). I think that making "few" be a child of the determiner in only some of these is asking for annotator disagreements and parsing errors, and I don't see any real benefit. If the goal is to have "a few" as a phrase, then I think it should follow the normal determiner as child + det option, which would maintain the status quo for independent "a few" and keep parallelism to the other constructions with "few". |
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Let me lay out my argument for the different constructions before getting to whether it is practical or not for annotators. I think the key syntactic tests for MWE status are:
I would advocate the MWE analysis (with flat) only for cases that pass the first test and fail the second, showing that the expression is particular to "a" + "few"/"little" and that together they function like "some". For example:
So while on the surface these are similar:
the above tests distinguish them (cases 2 & 4). Now, we have the question of whether it is practical to have UD annotators remember to use an anomalous deprel of "a" in the first two cases (flat rather than det). I can see the point that it requires a lot of nuance. While I think flat is more of a "proper" MWE treatment, I think it is OK to fudge a bit on the internal structure deprels to make them look more like the typical uses of those deprels, so I could envision the following compromise that does away with
Basically the principle would be, "a" modifies "few" rather than the head noun apart from case 5, with an intervening adjective that doesn't modify "few". We already do this if there is no head noun, so the change would make things more consistent. |
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I understand the reluctance of @amir-zeldes to use (Note that in SUD we decided not to use the relation @nschneid I don't think |
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I agree with @sylvainkahane that there is internal structure, but I think that rules out not only The about @nschneid 's suggestion: I would feel uncomfortable doing a chain of Finally, specifically for 5 above, if we want a phrasal "a few" analysis, then I don't think "a" should modify "days" (though currently it would). I think although semantically it is the days that are long, syntactically we have: det(few, a) |
I see your point but
But this makes "a long few" into a constituent, which I don't see any evidence for.
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I think it is a nominal expression, that's why it can take "a" in the first place, no? Compound determiners generally still have an underlying part of speech, and I think it's the same "a few" as always (so either a noun, or an adjective nominalized into a noun, but either way a nominal).
Some examples with an adjective but without a noun:
I feel really put off by the look of det <- det, especially with it being unparalleled elsewhere in English dependency analyses, and probably being typologically very rare across UD. In fact, I'm starting to think that if it is so unclear then maybe the best solution is actually the current one, which is possibly a bit naive but at least easy to explain and consistent across constructions. |
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"a select/specialized/fair/rare few"—these are all internal modification of "a few" (which is why it's arguably not The "bad few" example is ungrammatical for me. Perhaps a different dialect. |
I think those are semantic distinctions and not syntactic ones. Once the NN is dropped, the only thing left for modification is "few" either way. I'm also not really sure that's true of some of these, for example being a "select" few is a property of the thing counted, not of the count itself. But if you want clearer examples of semantically 'non-quantitative' modifiers, like "bad", those aren't too hard to find:
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Interesting. This is a sense of "few" that at least some dictionaries categorize as a noun. I think it prototypically means a minority of people. And I notice the adjective is often evaluative; maybe this is part of the construction's core meaning (singling a small group of people out as aberrant). Could it refer to a small quantity in general? I'm not sure: ?Though I enjoy eating berries, occasionally the experience is marred by a sour few. ??You can have all the sweet berries; I'll just have a sour few. (Better: a few sour ones) ??While the treatment used to require upwards of 12 visits, now it can be completed in only a short few. Anyway I'm becoming convinced that there's a continuum of grammaticalization at work here, with several interrelated and nuanced constructions, which is why categorization is tricky. |
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Yes, the more I look into examples the more I realize how productive this construction is, and it's hard to find clear boundaries between classes. For me this all speaks for just leaving it alone, and definitely staying away from fixed solutions. BTW there are plenty of examples of non-humans with adjectives, for example:
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OK but all of these seem to me like quantity-modifying adjectives rather than property adjectives. "a good few (budgies)" doesn't mean a few budgies that are good. One could have a good few bad budgies. I'm polling people on social media to see how they feel about the grammaticality of some of these. And getting mixed responses. Clearly it's complicated! |
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Hm, I see, well if you want 1. the few construction, 2. for the noun to be missing, 3. for there to be an adjective modifying few, 4. for that adjective to be semantically non-quantitative and 5. for the entire phrase to stand for a non-human... that's just going to be very rare by virtue of the chain rule - but I'm not sure if that's important for the syntax. If it is, then wading through corpus examples I can offer these cases, some are more borderline than others:
But TBH your example "a good few bad budgies" suggests to me that adjectives belonging syntactically to the 'lexical' noun should appear between it and "few", so if "long" were a syntactic modifier of "days", we should get "a few long days", not "a long few days". Semantics aside, I think the difference in position probably corresponds to a syntactic subordination difference. That all being said, I'm fine with keeping everything always being a dependent of the lexical noun if available, and of "few" if not, which is the status quo. |
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Yeah I'm hearing various levels of discomfort about some of these...a lot of "I definitely wouldn't say that but maybe someone would". So there's probably no fixed set of boundaries that all speakers would agree on, just some more prototypical and less prototypical cases. Even if I had a clear linguistic analysis of the full range of constructions, it probably wouldn't be obvious how to map them to UD in practice. So let's just stick with the status quo for now. |
I would like to discuss the analysis of "a few" (and later "a little").
Typically it modifies a plural noun, in which case the current analysis almost across the board in EWT and GUM is to attach "a" and "few" separately to the head noun, with
detandamodrespectively.I'm not sure this is the best analysis, however: consider that "a few" can stand alone for the NP, similar to "some" or "several":
"A few" can also be coordinated with quantifiers/quantities:
It can be followed by an "of"-PP:
And it can modify things other than plural nouns:
The "a" cannot be omitted or replaced with "the" and receive the same interpretation, nor can a possessive + few receive that interpretation:
Taken together, the expression functions a lot like determinative "many".
"A little" behaves very similarly except for mass rather than plural nouns:
Would it be better to analyze these as
fixed(a, few),fixed(a, little)?Here are the exceptions to the typical analysis in the corpus (including a couple of errors):
Note that there are other quantificational expressions with "a" + NOUN—a couple, a bit, a lot, a bunch. These already form a constituent with the article attaching to the noun as
det.Internal modification: some of these expressions allow intensification, but these may be lexicalized expressions as well. The ADJ ones seem less flexible than some of the NOUN ones:
a + ADJ
a + NOUN
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