The Copula Conundrum (initially: English 'be' and existentials/AUX vs. VERB) #706
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If I am not mistaken, be is not considered a copula in existential clauses in English. It is tagged But whenever be is attached as More generally (i.e., without focus on English), |
dan-zeman
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English
UPOS
Why? Is the idea that existential uses of "be" are somehow more contentful than copular and other auxiliary uses of "be"? |
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Some discussion is archived here. The third bullet point says that existential clauses are not treated as copular clauses if the verb has a different lemma than the equational copula, or different syntax. I think the "different syntax" was mentioned specifically because of English (where the there expletive is used, and the subject occurs after the verb). I'm personally not fond of this approach. |
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I guess the idea is that AUX should not be a head, so it should be tagged as VERB. But this is not discussed on the AUX page. Still, I'm not sure why the above couldn't be analyzed as root(kitchen), nsubj(kitchen, food), cop(kitchen, is), expl(kitchen, there). It is very similar in meaning to "Food is in the kitchen". Plain "There is food." could be treated like ellipsis, promoting "is" to the root: root(is), nsubj(is, food), expl(is, there). (BTW I checked CGEL and couldn't find a definitive statement on whether 'be' in an existential sentence is considered a copula. There is a list of different uses of 'be', including copulas, progressive and passive auxiliaries, quasi-modals, etc., but no existential example is given there.) |
nschneid
changed the title
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There are legitimate cases where The AUX page says that the category includes copulas. But if some instances of be are not considered copulas, then they lose the reason why they should be |
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I think one issue with annotating "there is" with the cop analysis is what to do when there is no locative phrase, e.g.: There are no alternatives. Saying that "there" is the predicate seems weird here, and the 'be as root' analysis just says this is like "no alternatives exist". |
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I think that if the locative phrase is missing, the copula (provided we say it is copula) will be promoted to the head position as in other instances of ellipsis (but it will not change its UPOS tag because of that). This should probably be the analysis in Czech (but the conversion procedure does not do it properly yet). The verb být "to be" is the equational copula, it is also used in existential clauses (with or without locative phrases) and unlike English, there is no special syntax. |
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I'm honestly OK with the way it is for English - if I say "there is a god", it doesn't feel like I have an elliptical locative predicate anywhere. I think it's a different sense of 'is', which is reflected in the construction with the expletive etc., maybe some intonation or stress differences too. Is there a real downside to assuming a reading of be that is a strong verb? |
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I've thought about this some more. To recap, we are dealing with 2 questions: 1) What should the dependency analysis be for existential constructions? 2) Should the be-verb in existential constructions be classified as a copula, and therefore tagged as
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There may be a cline semantically. Agreed that "there is a god" (or "there is a space shuttle that goes a bajillion miles per hour") emphasize pure existence-in-the-universe, but something like "there is food" implies existence in a particular situation. I don't have a strong opinion as to whether promotion only when there's no locative phrase makes sense. I'm hesitant to posit a different verb sense requiring a different POS tag, though. |
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It's only a different pos tag because of how upos defines AUX, which in my opinion is a functional term (something serves as an auxiliary) rather than a morphological category (if anything, 'be' is a morphological verb in all these uses). Other languages with PRON copulas already make this concession by saying pos is PRON while deprel is cop. I don't 100÷ understand why VERB can't be aux, but I do prefer the non copula analysis of pure existence cases, so I guess I'm happiest with the current situation (also less work :) |
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How about this as an argument: making a question out of a there-be existentials involves fronting the be-verb: There is a god -> Is there a god? This inversion is reminiscent of copulas or auxiliaries, not full verbs, which require do-support: There exists a god -> Does there exist a god? / *Exists there a god? |
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I completely agree that 'be' has interesting and idiosyncratic syntax, but I don't think that makes it an auxiliary in all contexts. The inverted order appears in archaic constructions to this day ("dare we change this guideline?") but that doesn't mean we have to tag the matrix verb in all of them as AUX. Nor is the tag AUX monolithic in UD English syntactically, for example modals have quite different syntax from 'be' (and 'have'). For me at least, being an auxiliary is a relational property. For existence predication, like "to be or not to be", I don't feel there's something there that it's serving as an auxiliary to (be alive?). But I'll also admit two biases I have: I don't really use upos due to how coarse it is, and I don't like changing broadly used, high impact guidelines without really strong reasons. It just leads to tons of conversion and validation errors, tools that behave differently/erratically, and explaining to students that this corpus looks different because it's from before version x, and in those slides it's version y, and then... I'm willing to do that work for improtant improvements, but this looks more like a case of "could probably work either way" to me. |
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Just for fun I created a Twitter poll: https://twitter.com/complingy/status/1259256679000166406 In the discussion Valia Kordoni asked about case. While it is pragmatically weird to use a cased pronoun in an existential construction, my intuitions are roughly the same as for regular copulas: "There is I/me" feels like "It is I/me". Nominative feels stilted and accusative feels colloquial. Perhaps this is another argument in favor of the copula analysis. |
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I'm not sure what I/me shows here, since in any case it's the subject not the (proposed) predicate in "there's me". Shouldn't the subject be (normatively) nominative in both constructions? In the copula construction we normally have: "I'm a teacher" So arguably one could say the preference to "me" shows that it's not the copula construction. But I'm not making that claim - I don't think it's evidence one way or the other, IMO it just shows that English doesn't like to have "I" post-verbally in the linear order. |
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The point is that English speakers don't feel entirely comfortable with cased post-copular subjects, and both nominative and accusative are acceptable to an extent. "The teacher you were talking about is I/me"—"I" sounds more formal, perhaps because it was prescriptively taught as the proper form, while "me" sounds more casual. (Similar to the situation with coordination: people were taught in school to say "John and I" rather than "John and me" and now the former is often heard even in object position.) I'm not aware of a verb other than "be" that has this flexibility postverbally—nobody would say "He saw/told I", for example. |
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I still don't understand why this matters - the shape of the subject isn't the issue, it's the predicate that is unique in copula constructions (namely, that the verbal element is not the predicate). In "the teacher you were talking about is me", we are predicating something like me(teacher), so we call it a copula construction. The fact that 'I' is possible here, but "there's I" is not is, if anything, a difference between the copula and the existential construction. In something like "there's a problem", by contrast, we predicate exists(problem), not there(problem) or location(problem,there) or anything like that. As for the instability of 'I/me' postverbally, I think it's neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for distinguishing the two constructions: there are plenty of cases in which 'be' is not really equating or being an auxiliary, in which inversion can't happen: I think therefore (I/*me) am My real issue with considering this
I'm not saying everything fits neatly - in a Radical Construction Grammar sense, 'be' in the 'there construction' is its own thing period, but if we have to choose between VERB and AUX, I see pretty good reasons to go with VERB, and even if we think it's a close call, not enough reasons to overturn a highly impactful guideline that would require revising all UD English TBs and reeducating everyone who knows this guideline. |
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I'll grant that in "I think, therefore I am", where the be-verb has only an ordinary subject and no expletive or complement, it seems to be more of a full verb than an aux/copula. Semantically, existential constructions are somewhere in between that sense and normal copular predications (especially when a location is overt). Syntactically, question inversion is in common between existentials and normal copulas. And intuitively I always assumed it was a copula—while I knew there were special guidelines for existential dependencies it never occurred to me that it wouldn't be tagged as AUX (and I don't think this is really documented, hence this issue). Maybe this is really an intermediate case where "be" is acting not quite like a full verb or a copula, and it seems people on Twitter are divided on whether it should be called a copula (currently it's 24 yes–21 no). I'd like to hear from other UD folks/syntacticians. Not persuaded by the stare decisis argument because a) the tagging decision specifically is not really documented in the guidelines yet, b) it seems (to me) like more of a special exception to call it a VERB in existential constructions but not copular constructions, so annotators might find AUX more natural, and c) it is trivial to change existing treebanks with a rule. But again, if people are convinced there are strong syntactic arguments on both sides, I'm happy to have the status quo documented. :) I think stare decisis is more persuasive as to the dependencies—the policy is clearly documented, and anyway I think we are bound to lose something about the construction in any pure-dependencies approach—so I see less of an argument for changing those. |
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If we accept that a word can be AUX just some of the time, then this becomes a question of which ones are which, rather than a sweeping guideline (be -> AUX). The more I think about it, the more I realize that for me the main criterion is not whether there's inversion or some other morphosyntactic phenomenon, but rather whether there is some kind of auxiliary function. For the following, I think there is nothing 'supported' by 'be', so I think it should be VERB:
If those are OK as be/VERB+root(be), then we only need to talk about the difference between:
I am fine with the second one being What about "there are cookies in the jar"? Functionally/semantically, it is very similar to "the cookies are in the jar". But I'd like to argue it's a good idea to treat it like "there are cookies", because it is very difficult to draw the line between locative predication and adjuncts to the existential predicate. UD wants to avoid the argument/adjunct distinction, but since in this case we need to differentiate dependent from predicate, we have to choose a side:
If so, OK, but what about this:
If this is not semantically forever(cookies) but rather exist(cookies,forever), what about some semantic locations:
And if the last one doesn't look 100% clear cut, that just means we will soon have annotators getting confused and disagreeing. We could try to look for more borderline PP cases (where the PPs are maybe non-compositional MWEs, or whatever), but I think if we agree there is any kind of PP or ADV in which it's still be/VERB, then life is much easier and the TB more predictable if we say this:
I also think this actually is stare decisis - not because it's in the UD guidelines (though it is in the GUM guidelines, so that's a res judicata), but because that's how the TBs currently behave, and changing it would be a hassle that I don't see a real benefit from. More generally I prefer a little simplistic but predictable to really clever but not reliable - form based guidelines usually lead to the fewest surprises IMO. |
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Personally, I have to say that, after some reasoning, I'm advocating for the non-copular interpretation of the existential clause. A more etymological point of view which overlaps with other arguments in this conversation: there seems to be originally just an This brings me actually to question the validity of treating locative nonverbal predications (point 3 here) as copulas, rather than full For what it is worth, again with respect to Italian, at school we were taught to treat constructions such as la penna è nel cassetto 'the pen is in the drawer' not as copulas, but as the exact equivalent of la penna si trova nel cassetto 'the pen "finds itself" (= is) in the drawer', i.e. as verbal predicates with a full verb; as such, in UD terms: nsubj(trova,penna), obl(trova,cassetto), expl(trova,si) (reflexive). This is the point of view of traditional Italian grammar. By the way, just another cross-linguistical comparison with Mongolian, a language where copulas can normally be omitted, e.g. Энэ миний ном / Ene minii nom 'This [is] my book': here the copula байна / baina 'is' is redundant. But (a good reference is Janhunen 2012, §7.5) in existential clauses this is normally not allowed, "though the adverbial modifier can be absent when understood from the context" (Janhunen 2012): Манай өрөөнд хоёр сандал байна / Manai öröönd khoyor sandal baina 'There are two chairs in our room', but also, Xоёр сандал манай өрөөнд байна 'The two chairs are in our room', depending on topicalization. To sum it up: such different possibilities in the omission of the "existential element" point to two different constructions and, I think, to the fact that existential and locative clauses (points 3 and 6 here) might represent the same phenomenon and should not be treated as copulas. |
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@Stormur : FWIW, I've been taught the same thing in the school (i.e., locative phrases with to be are not considered predicates with a copula), but apparently the grammatical tradition is not the same everywhere. There was a heated debate about this when v2 guidelines were being prepared, and the points you cite are the result. I think the main argument was that in some langauges, unlike Mongolian, the is can be omitted (EDIT: in fact, it must be omitted if it is in the present tense) exactly in the same manner as in equational phrases. E.g. Russian: Эти два стула в нашей комнате. / Èti dva stula v našej komnate. 'The two chairs [are] in our room.' |
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@dan-zeman But isn't the fact that some languages do have this distinction, rather than some languages not having it, that should influence the fact that UD also makes such a difference? I also mean, couldn't the Russian example be as well treated as an ellipsis |
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Interesting, I didn't know some grammatical traditions considered locative be-expressions not to be copulas! Makes me wonder if the UD guidelines should avoid the term "copula" altogether and instead be more specific as to where the line is drawn. Regarding @amir-zeldes's ubiquitous cookies examples, I guess I don't see "ubiquitous" as being locative, whereas "everywhere" is (even though the underlying speaker intent may be similar, the semantic construal is different). Where are the cookies? They are everywhere/#ubiquitous. With some more context one could infer that ubiquity may imply occurring-at-many-locations (Where can I buy cookies? - Oh, they're ubiquitous! You can find them at any café.) but this seems beyond the scope of what we need to think about for syntax. |
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@Stormur : Sorry, I said it can be omitted but I should have said it must be omitted (in the present tense; in the past tense the copula is there). The point is that there are locative predicates that behave the same way as nominal-equational or adjectival-attributive predicates: they have no copula in the present tense and they use a copula in the past and future tenses. I agree that we could analyze the copula-less clauses as ellipsis (if the UD guidelines did not explicitly say otherwise) but then we would do it for all clauses with non-verbal predicates, locative or not. |
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@Stormur when working on the guidelines, Stassen's book on intransitive predication was an excellent help. There is also a spreadsheet I was working on which has some analysis and comparisons. |
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@Stormur : I don't think there is so much freedom for single languages to deal with cases 2-5 here. I think that both 1 and 3 should be treated the same way in Latin. I had a hard time to find an example of 3 (locative) in ITTB, as it mostly talks about abstract things (but there seem to be plenty of non-locational prepositional predicates, which are also not treated as such!) Maybe this would work:
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@ftyers Thanks for showing it to me! Do you need some consulence for e.g. Latin, Italian, or... Mongolian? 🙂 As for the book, I will surely give it a look. @dan-zeman I was interpreting "All other cases of putative copula constructions (categories 2-5) should be assimilated to the equational and existential cases as seems to make most sense according to the inherent logic of the language concerned." as a way to say that, given the precedent points (overt copula, possible absence thereof, different syntax...), in the end, assuming the equative construction as the prototypical copula and the existential one as something different, each language needs to make its own assessments for cases 2 to 5. I see a bipolar (1 vs 6) scale of "copular prototypicity" implied here. So, for Latin that would lead me to use a copular interpretation for 1, 2, 4, 5 and a non-copular one for 3 and 6. Edit: below some examples in Latin... |
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I have followed the discussion and noticed (a) that most of the arguments are familiar from earlier discussions, and (b) that there simply is no single analysis that deals with all of them in a satisfactory way. In fact, the treatment of copula constructions is in my view one of the least satisfactory parts of the UD guidelines, no matter how you deal with the corner cases, and I have been convinced for some time that it may have been a mistake not to treat all verbs as heads of clauses, including copulas. Let me try to articulate this position. The main argument in favor of treating the nonverbal predicate as the head in sentences like "she is nice" and "he is a dancer" is to get a structure that is parallel across languages regardless of whether they use a copula or not. In all languages, we have: nsubj(nice, she) In some languages, we in addition have: cop(nice, is) The alternative analysis is to follow frameworks like LFG and treat copula constructions as essentially biclausal structures: nsubj(is, she) This would mean that we lose the parallelism with copula-less languages in the basic dependencies, but we can still capture it in the enhanced dependencies, where all languages (in virtue of how xcomp works) would have: nsubj(nice, she) Moreover, it would solve three problems with the existing analysis:
In conclusion, treating copula verbs just like other verbs would in one fell swoop eliminate all the major problems with the current analysis, at the very small expense of losing one parallelism in basic dependencies that can be regained in the enhanced dependencies. As @dan-zeman knows, we were very close to making this switch when going from v1 to v2, and I honestly regret not seeing the pros and cons more clearly at the time. For v2, we are obviously bound by the current guidelines, but if we ever get to v3 I think we should seriously consider making this switch. I would be interested to hear what others think about this. |
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@dan-zeman Now for some ramblings of mine about the sentences, for examples and completeness, coming late...
I highlighted the alternative translations because I think that any correct translation should use a "full verb" and not just is, but I could be biased. The fact is that Latin esse 'to be' has a stronger existential value than its Italian (essere) or English counterparts. Probably, often the line is blurry and is represented by a tenuous syntactic difference; compare the motto est modus in rebus 'there is a measure in things', unequivocably existential: here, reminescent of the English construction, est is topicalized, but the same sentence would stay as modus est in rebus, probably with emphasis on measure: 'there is a measure in things'. I see this subtle difference actually as an argument to put, in Latin, 3 together with 6. |
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@jnivre I don't agree that this would solve everything because:
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@jnivre We adopt the analysis of AUX as heads in SUD and the rule of conversion are ready and very easy to apply to all treebanks. @bguil can convert all UD treebanks as soon as you decide to do it. In fact they are all already converted in SUD and accessible with grew-match. We can easily restrict this conversion to AUX which are Nevertheless, as soon as you do that for copulas, the question arises for auxiliaries, because the boundary between copulas and auxiliaries is not so clear. For instance, in English, the verb BE is used as a copula as well as an auxiliary in progressive and passive constructions and it has been argued in some works that it could behave as a copula in such constructions (especially passive). What @jnivre said about enhanced relations in copulative construction is the idea behind SUD. The syntactic annotation should be a surface-syntactic one, based on disributional criteria. The copula is the head because it controls the distribution of the clause. And the parallelism between languages with or without copulas can be captured much more properly at the enhanced level. |
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@sylvainkahane in languages with optional copula and optional subject, it seems more natural to say the predicate controls the distribution of the entire construction. But in any case, if that is the criterion, then UD would be inconsistent if it doesn't revert nmod/obl+case to Stanford's prep+pobj model IMO. |
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@jnivre I will say from my experience that treating copulas as modifiers is one of the biggest challenges both for annotation and for converting UD to semantic representations. Apart from the ones you mentioned, reasons the current practice is difficult include:
If one of the design principles of UD is to be easily usable by downstream tools, arguably copula constructions are a pain point with the current approach. BUT I think this raises a more general issue: As Enhanced Dependencies mature, should individual languages be freer to make other decisions about Basic Dependencies that are contrary to the previous emphasis on crosslinguistic parallelism? For example, treating adpositions as heads (as in Stanford Dependencies) where they are really adpositional and not case markers? Is it relevant (as @amir-zeldes raises) that Enhanced Dependencies are not as universally supported? In other words: Are you suggesting we reconceptualize some of the fundamental principles of Basic Dependencies to shift some of the burden of crosslinguistic parallelism to Enhanced Dependencies? Or are you singling out copula constructions as uniquely problematic in our current approach? Allowing languages to diverge more freely in Basic Dependencies would be a pretty radical change. I'm not advocating for that, I just want to have clarity on the principles of what should go in Basic vs. Enhanced. |
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I think basic dependencies should not be more anarchistic just because we have enhanced dependencies. The cross-linguistic parallelism should still be maintained as much as possible. As for copula, I share @jnivre 's doubts whether the benefit of the current UD approach outweighs the downsides. However, @amir-zeldes is right that there is another specter lurking in the blurry line between be-copula and be-passive-auxiliary (not just in English). I forgot about this issue, although it was one of the awkward features of the Prague annotation scheme; I'm not sure I want to face it in UD :-) |
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Thanks @sylvainkahane for raising the passive issue, that is indeed a thorny problem (and more generally aux being a child is indeed something I would not expect if copulas are roots). @nschneid I agree that unlike coordination and inability to extract the modification structure are problems with the current copula analysis, but they are also a problem with the rest of lexico-centrism:
I have followed these discussions ever since UD phased out SD (Stanford Dependencies), and have also invested considerable time in converting data from SD to UD in the spirit of lexico-centrism. It was a lot of work, but I'm not sorry for doing it: the current analysis is more consistent IMO, I think that SD, although great for English, was not as cross-linguistically applicable, and the abstract principles behind UD are easier to defend and adjudicate (we do this in class every fall, when we expand GUM in a team of some 20 annotators). And now that copulas behave the way they do in UD, we have lots of graduate and undergraduate students who use them in corpus searches, write papers based on this, build tools, write guidelines for more low resource languages... The reason I give this background is to remind everyone more concretely of all the people who are affected by massive changes like these. I'm not saying the current copula analysis is perfect, but neither is any alternative I'm aware of. Big breaking changes do mean however that a bunch of papers become less relevant/impossible to compare to, tools stop working, websites crash, and, if we're lucky, some dedicated students pour hours of work into making things run again. Given that price tag, my initial reaction to any statement that says that "something about UD should look very different from how it is now" is caution. |
Totally agree, I'm just a little more comfortable in principle conflating NP/PP modifiers than I am conflating NP/PP AND clause modifiers. :) Perhaps there's a way to indicate some of these distinctions as features or deprel refinements somehow, without changing the basic tree, such that conversions into a format using functional heads, or NP/PP/clause constituents, etc., would become deterministic? |
But wouldn't this mean (as others have already argued) that we just shift the problem of choosing whether to use While it has advantages, it seems to me a little like shoving the problem under the carpet (i.e. enhanced dependencies) and not really solving it...
Finally, just for curiosity, has it already been proposed to conflate |
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I am happy to hear that things are not as simple as I thought. :)
Granted. I was not suggesting that all treebanks must have enhanced dependencies. I was just pointing out that there may be ways to mitigate the loss of this parallellism.
If we make the change to treating "be" as a predicate, then I think we should use obl in both cases: cookies are on the table there are cookies on the table In fact, this alternation could conceivably be used as a test for the xcomp-obl distinction: cookies are on the table cookies are nice
This is obviously a crucial point, and it is related to something that I think we need to clarify anyway. I don't think lexico-centrism, or prioritizing content words over function words, is quite the right characterisation for the UD philosophy. I would rather describe it as prioritizing predicates, arguments and modifiers over grammatical markers. To a large extent, this is equivalent to putting content words above function words in the trees, but in the case of pronouns, for example, it is not. Pronouns are closed class items, but they typically occur in argument positions and are therefore treated in the same way as nouns and other words that play similar roles. So promoting copula verbs to heads would amount to treating them as predicates and not grammatical markers. The evidence for this move may be debated, but it wouldn't by itself necessarily entail reversing other relations that involve closed class items.
Granted again. This is what I once called "Ginter's razor", the less famous cousin of "Manning's law": Annotation changes should not be multiplied beyond necessity. |
nschneid
changed the title
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@jnivre the formulation using predicates and arguments is helpful, though in this case it just sharpens the central question, which is whether "(be) nice" is the predicate, or "be"... For the locatives, if we use @nschneid I'm much more in favor of using FEATS or MISC to add these distinctions if needed, while the core dependencies stay stable. More generally, if there's a structure I don't like, I can always write a script to change it internally for some application, but I can only rely on that script if the fresh data from the UD repos remains stable. IMO it's much better to know that the data on GitHub changes mainly in three ways:
Big changes not in these categories always make me nervous... |
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To @sylvainkahane's point about passives: Do I understand correctly that the objection is that passives and copulas can be difficult to distinguish? For languages where passives/copulas are marked by function words we already make the distinction ( If the point is that the line is blurry between them and so the structure should be similar—it seems like it could be explained by reanalysis/grammaticalization, which sometimes could involve a change in headedness. |
I don't see any discussion in current guidelines of As I understand it, @jnivre's proposal would give us:
This is indeed a bit weird, especially considering that PPs are generally treated as similar to nominals. If "The project was on track" is |
True, the distinction has to be made already now. But it is "only" between two relation types, both of them functional. The rest of the tree looks the same. On the other hand, if we move to treating copulae as predicates, we will end up with different heads.
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I don't know if this proposal already existes and how it fits well with all of the above, but, if one of the main problems with copulae is that a clausal "non-verbal" predication would look as if having two subjects, couldn't it be admissible to introduce an obligatory subrelation |
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Relation subtypes are never obligatory [:)]. But yes, some of them are strongly encouraged where applicable ( But if I understand it correctly, |
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I know, but this might be the first, right? 😬 I thought such an "obligatory subtype" might be cleaner and clearer, than, say, a new relation I mixed two things: I mean, if you have the sentence The problem surely is that subrelations are not obligatory, then also surely could receive the The description of the existing More broadly speaking, I think that the actual representation of copulae has nothing wrong. The "problem" of dependencies is just that we cannot distinguish between a phrase and the head of that phrase in terms of dependencies, so probably the only way is to make it explicit on the relation. As for a validation rule, maybe a double |
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I think that this is probably a separate issue and has been discussed before, definitely around the time of the v2 guidelines. Issue #657 seems relevant. |
- Complete list of AUX lexemes - Address issues like existentials (#706), "ought to" and "have to" (UniversalDependencies/UD_English-EWT/issues/411), "dare" and "need" (UniversalDependencies/UD_English-EWT#494)
For English, both EWT and GUM have many examples of copulas tagged as
VERB.Are there certain constructions (e.g. existential constructions) where
VERBis correct, or are these all errors? If the latter, would a validation rule be possible/appropriate, given that (at least for English) "be" is never ambiguous betweenVERBandAUX?The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: