Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Jonathan Robie
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Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by Jonathan Robie »

I would like to discuss an issue about the representation of Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees.

Consider the following:
Luke 1:8 wrote:ἐν τῇ τάξει τῆς ἐφημερίας αὐτοῦ
Here is how it is currently represented in our trees:
genitive-phrase.png
genitive-phrase.png (29.48 KiB) Viewed 4163 times
Note that in the GBI trees, the genitive pronoun binds more tightly to the noun than the article: [ τῆς [ ἐφημερίας αὐτοῦ ] ], rather than [ [ τῆς ἐφημερίας ] αὐτοῦ ]. Should it bind the second way instead?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by Stephen Carlson »

I think this has to do with your theory of the noun phrase. Some hold the noun to be the head of the phrase; others hold the article to be the head of a determiner phrase (DP). Although the DP hypothesis seems to be more popular, especially among generative linguistics, I don't think there is a real consensus on the question.

Here it looks like whoever did the syntax tree follows the DP hypothesis.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
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MAubrey
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by MAubrey »

Stephen Carlson wrote:I think this has to do with your theory of the noun phrase. Some hold the noun to be the head of the phrase; others hold the article to be the head of a determiner phrase (DP). Although the DP hypothesis seems to be more popular, especially among generative linguistics, I don't think there is a real consensus on the question.

Here it looks like whoever did the syntax tree follows the DP hypothesis.
The DP hypothesis is very popular with many people working in Greek (both ancient & modern).
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
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Stephen Hughes
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by Stephen Hughes »

This is way out of my league both in treeing, computing and linguistics, but to answer it in another way, I'm still forming my ideas about beauty and balance in sentences structures, but wouldn't what you are trying to represent be the same way that you would represent other balances in the way that the language is expressed? Have a look at some of them...
John 17:10 wrote:καὶ τὰ ἐμὰ πάντα σά ἐστιν, καὶ τὰ σὰ ἐμά·
1-3*2(>4) + 1-3[*2(>4)] (first element balanced with the third on the second leading onto the fourth.

The balancing element (in the centre), the πάντα is not spelt out in the second part of the expression, but because it has the things that need it to balance on, it is sort of expected there,
Hebrews 8:1 wrote:τοιοῦτον ἔχομεν ἀρχιερέα
1-3*2>the relative clause (as 4th).
Hebrews 8:1 wrote:ὃς ἐκάθισεν ἐν δεξιᾷ τοῦ θρόνου τῆς μεγαλωσύνης ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς,
If the ὃς is read with a pause after it, 1-5*(2-4*3). The ἐν δεξιᾷ τοῦ θρόνου τῆς μεγαλωσύνης has the balance around the τοῦ θρόνου, and the ἐκάθισεν and the ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς are balanced around ἐν δεξιᾷ τοῦ θρόνου τῆς μεγαλωσύνης phrase as a whole.

For this type of noun phrases that you are looking at the balances are similar.
Luke 1:8 wrote:ἐν τῇ τάξει τῆς ἐφημερίας αὐτοῦ
ἐν+1-(3-5*4)*2 (τῇ balanced with the phrase τῆς ἐφημερίας αὐτοῦ (which itself consists of the balance of τῆς and αὐτοῦ on ἐφημερίας) on the word τάξει).
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by Jonathan Robie »

One place I bumped into this is in the verb catalog I generated. Randall suggested that I stop throwing away an attribute GBI provides that identifies the head of a phrase, and that might be the right solution. But I'd still like to explore this a little further.

In my verb catalog for Luke, I got the following (incorrect) result:
brexo.png
brexo.png (12.61 KiB) Viewed 4090 times
In reality, both objects are accusative, but my query was tripped up by the genitive pronoun.

Here are the relevant sentences:
αὕτη δὲ τοῖς δάκρυσιν ἔβρεξέν μου τοὺς πόδας καὶ ταῖς θριξὶν αὐτῆς ἐξέμαξεν
ᾗ δὲ ἡμέρᾳ ἐξῆλθεν Λὼτ ἀπὸ Σοδόμων, ἔβρεξεν πῦρ καὶ θεῖον ἀπ’ οὐρανοῦ καὶ ἀπώλεσεν πάντας.
I am basically looking for a reliable algorithm to identify the case of a verb's object. If a phrase is known to be the object of a verb, what is the algorithm for identifying the case? Or should I simply rely on the GBI's head marker?

(I'm a computer guy, not a linguist, so my ignorance of linguistics will show in these threads ...)
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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TimNelson
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by TimNelson »

Jonathan Robie wrote:I am basically looking for a reliable algorithm to identify the case of a verb's object. If a phrase is known to be the object of a verb, what is the algorithm for identifying the case? Or should I simply rely on the GBI's head marker?

(I'm a computer guy, not a linguist, so my ignorance of linguistics will show in these threads ...)
I'm also a computer guy, and have had only minimal linguistic training (one semester introductory course, and I think it was the other introductory course that covered grammar; most of my grammar actually comes from doing Greek). My suspicion is that this is going to be a question you'll need to answer yourself. I'd expect the program needs to be written in multiple stages, as follows:

a) What you're doing now; generating the possibilities; if you could generate it in such a way (just for your testing) that the first one says genitive OR accusative (because both are present), then that would be even better. If you could also get your program to work on a large enough corpus that you could generate 20-30 hits for each verb, that would also be good.
b) Look at the common exceptions. If your program is throwing up about 80-90% accusatives, and 10-20% mistaken genitives, and it turns out that eg. all of the genitives are pronouns, then you've learned something useful. Of course, the answer might be something completely different.

Sorry I can't help more. Also, are you taking into account verbs with double objects?
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Can βρέχειν actually govern a genitive object? Shouldn't you use a verb's selectional restrictions (i.e. which case it governs) to identify objects?
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TimNelson
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by TimNelson »

Stephen: My assumption (which may be wrong) is that Jonathan doesn't have that information in computer-readable format, and he's trying to see if he can get the computer to figure it out for him, rather than him having to go through and mark every verb.
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by Jonathan Robie »

TimNelson wrote:My suspicion is that this is going to be a question you'll need to answer yourself.
Yeah, probably.
TimNelson wrote:I'd expect the program needs to be written in multiple stages, as follows:

a) What you're doing now; generating the possibilities; if you could generate it in such a way (just for your testing) that the first one says genitive OR accusative (because both are present), then that would be even better. If you could also get your program to work on a large enough corpus that you could generate 20-30 hits for each verb, that would also be good.
b) Look at the common exceptions. If your program is throwing up about 80-90% accusatives, and 10-20% mistaken genitives, and it turns out that eg. all of the genitives are pronouns, then you've learned something useful. Of course, the answer might be something completely different.
Or just generate it in a way that lists each of the objects in a way that makes it easy to see. This is the query from http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/vie ... =11&t=2817, it's easy to modify.
TimNelson wrote:Sorry I can't help more. Also, are you taking into account verbs with double objects?
Sort of, but in a way that make it too easy to overlook them.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Genitive Pronouns in Noun Phrases in Syntax Trees

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote:Can βρέχειν actually govern a genitive object? Shouldn't you use a verb's selectional restrictions (i.e. which case it governs) to identify objects?
TimNelson wrote:Stephen: My assumption (which may be wrong) is that Jonathan doesn't have that information in computer-readable format, and he's trying to see if he can get the computer to figure it out for him, rather than him having to go through and mark every verb.
Yes, precisely. I have the entire GNT in trees, and I can use that to tell me, for each verb, the cases in which it takes its objects, with a listing of each argument by case. That's information that the freely available lexicons don't give me. And if I come up with it in a useful form, I'll put it in github so it's freely available.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
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