More nonprojectivity errors

[nschneid]

Some nonprojective modifiers were weeded out in #545, but more errors causing nonprojectivity remain.

• q1 sentences with slashes
• q2 others
  • q3 zooming in on the most suspicious cases

Valid causes of nonprojectivity: comparatives, fronted-WH constructions, (arguably) parentheticals, floating quantifiers/emphatic reflexives

Some of the errors are due to optional depictives with the old acl annotation (should be advcl, not caught in #321).

[nschneid]

"Performance tests will either be performed on a project basis or a unit by unit basis in a given project."
"on either a fixed or floating basis"

Should the "either" be a nonprojective cc:preconj?

[nschneid]

Nonprojective expansions include "X, not Y", "X, even Y", "X, rather than Y", "X, such as Y" where X contains a nominal antecedent being contrasted with (but not at the end).

Also a problem: city/state/ZIP/country in street addresses.

[nschneid]

"up to a 60 day delivery"; "up to and including delivery" (note that the fixed guidelines only cover "up to" when used with quantities)

"is influenced by and has Jamaican references": how to attach "by"???
"do not and will not have": hot to attach "not"? (are coordinated auxes promoted as heads of adverbs that go with them?) amir-zeldes/gum#107

[nschneid]

"simply the best instructor": attachment of "simply"? It is currently attached to "best", whereas "the" attaches to "instructor", causing nonprojectivity. @amir-zeldes

[mr-martian]

"simply the best instructor": attachment of "simply"? It is currently attached to "best", whereas "the" attaches to "instructor", causing nonprojectivity. @amir-zeldes

"simply" there sounds to me like an adverbial modification of the entire predicate. If we had "he is looking for simply the best instructor" it would be "looking", if it's "he is simply the best instructor" I'd think "instructor".

[nschneid]

I think (and dictionaries agree) that there's an intensifier adverb sense of "simply", e.g. "a simply amazing instructor" (*a simply instructor). What seems to have happened is that "the best" started acting like an adjective ("amazing") and taking modifiers accordingly. You can't add another determiner though: *I want a the best bottle. In that respect, structurally, best acts like other superlative adjectives, and only with "the" is "simply" permitted prenominally AFAICT: ??I want simply your best bottle. So maybe there's an incongruity between the syntactic and semantic modification structure.

[amir-zeldes]

I agree with @mr-martian , by default I would assume it modifies the entire phrase, which is why it stands outside the NP span (English doesn't generally allow intensifiers on an adjective to stand outside the NP bracket). "Simply" is also not a modification of the way in which this instructor is good or of that goodness (i.e. simply good vs. complicatedly good, "good in a way which is simple/complicated"). I think it's more like "Simply put, this is the best instructor".

[nschneid]

That is one possible reading. I get the feeling that "simply" and "the best" are collocates to accentuate the praise; He is simply the/an instructor feels very different. We certainly need to acknowledge that "simply" can have intensification semantics in "a simply amazing instructor". But in "simply the best instructor" I think it doesn't make much sense to have "the" and "simply" headed by different things, so whether you view it as adnominal or adverbial, it has the same UD structure.

[amir-zeldes]

Yeah, I agree "a simply amazing instructor" should have the normal adjective intensifier tree, but if it's outside the NP I think we should stick to the expected phrase modifier reading.

[nschneid]

OK I think I've fixed the low-hanging fruit. Lots of theoretical issues that can be revisited though, e.g. how we treat expansions/parentheticals that are not classic appositions—whether they ought to be appos (often nonprojectively so) or something else (cf. UniversalDependencies/docs#1024). And street addresses need a policy.