docs: "Let PRONOUN VERB" inconsistencies
We noticed these recently in the UD_English treebank… (version 1.4)
For “let PRONOUN VERB”, it seems to always have either xcomp(let,VERB) or ccomp(let,VERB).
But for some cases there’s
- dobj(let, PRONOUN)
and in others
- nsubj(VERB, PRONOUN)
I could see arguments either way of course. Here are two examples for “let me know” with the inconsistency. Or is there a consistency we’re not seeing?
These are from grep -n ... | cut -f1,2,7,8 so the line numbers are included.
en-ud-dev.conllu:5363:1 Let 0 root
en-ud-dev.conllu-5364-2 me 3 nsubj
en-ud-dev.conllu-5365-3 know 1 ccomp
en-ud-train.conllu:71801:1 Let 0 root
en-ud-train.conllu-71802-2 me 1 dobj
en-ud-train.conllu-71803-3 know 1 ccomp
and some others
en-ud-train.conllu-53321-3 please 4 discourse
en-ud-train.conllu:53322:4 let 0 root
en-ud-train.conllu-53323-5 us 6 nsubj
en-ud-train.conllu-53324-6 know 4 ccomp
en-ud-train.conllu-85530-7 please 8 discourse
en-ud-train.conllu:85531:8 let 0 root
en-ud-train.conllu-85532-9 me 8 dobj
en-ud-train.conllu-85533-10 know 8 xcomp
and a more complex nsubj(VERB,PRONOUN) example (where VERB is replaced by predicate due to copula handling):
en-ud-train.conllu:103715:1 Let 0 root
en-ud-train.conllu-103716-2 your 3 nmod:poss
en-ud-train.conllu-103717-3 mind 9 nsubj
en-ud-train.conllu-103718-4 and 3 cc
en-ud-train.conllu-103719-5 body 3 conj
en-ud-train.conllu-103720-6 be 9 cop
en-ud-train.conllu-103721-7 totally 9 advmod
en-ud-train.conllu-103722-8 at 9 case
en-ud-train.conllu-103723-9 peace 1 ccomp
en-ud-train.conllu-103724-10 . 1 punct
About this issue
- Original URL
- State: closed
- Created 8 years ago
- Comments: 35 (32 by maintainers)
Even if there is a possibility for different semantic readings of “let someone know something”, I don’t think those should play out differently at the syntactic level: the entrenchment of “let know” makes it possible for it to assume meanings, but those meanings still piggyback on the syntactic structure “let NP VP”. I don’t think it’s feasible to ask annotators to try to figure out if Kim is allowed to find out about the secret from other sources, and in any case, I still believe that syntactically “know” is what licenses “thing known” as an object, not “let” (otherwise, not only does “let” have two objects, but “know” is bizarrely missing its normal object argument too).
Well, COCA is about 1G tokens, so if the frequency of this is so low, and some of the hits are not the construction/possible closed caption errors, this all suggests to me that “X was let known Y” is marginal at best (and maybe it’s grammatical for some speakers, but personally it really triggers my asterisk 😃
Of course it could be ongoing language change and maybe one day we’ll even see “I let know Kim the secret”. But for now I think all of this doesn’t look like a reason to deviate from the expected obj+xcomp for “Let NP know NP” to a non-compositional discontinuous compound with iobj.
I don’t think I understand this issue - they are objects of two different verbs, no?
obj(let, me) obj(know, date)
So nothing needs to be iobj, right?
Judging by this query of “encourage”, the pronoun is the dobj of the matrix verb. I will add this to the documentation of xcomp.
“Make” can also have this argument structure, right? “let/make them eat cake”
Unlike classic examples of control (e.g., “want them to eat cake”) the second verb is not preceded by infinitival “to”. Nevertheless, xcomp seems to fit.
(“Let X know” is an idiom, but that probably doesn’t affect its syntactic analysis.)