Analysis and computational implementation

5.1 Serial verbs as putative complements

This group contains control and raising constructions, following Arka (2000). Control verbs assign a semantic role to their subject, while raising verbs do not. Sag et al. (2003:376) also state that subject control verbs express a relation between an individual and a situation, while subject raising verbs express properties of situations.

Control SVC. The head daughter of this construction is V1. V1’s predications involve two things:

the first one is the subject (SUBJ) which is the shared argument (a noun) of V1 and V2 and the second one is some situation predicated by V2 (COMPS). V2 is a semantic argument of V1’s predication. Its index is linked to both V1 and V2. V2’s semantic (SEM) external argument (XARG) is identified with its subject’s semantic index. That index is identified with the first argument (ARG1) in the lexical relation (KEYREL) introduced by the verb. This is illustrated in 16. See also Figure 1 on the next page for the Dependency Minimal Recursion Semantics (DMRS) representation of the control construction. The head-complement rule unifies V1’s constraints on its complement with those of V2 which results in the identification of the XARG value of V2 with the index of the subject. The head-complement rule also propagates up the constraints on the subject from the head daughter mencoba “tried” to the verb phrase mencoba membuka palang itu “tried to open that shutter”. The semantics of this verb phrase preserve the semantic properties of its daughters, including the desired reentrancies with the subject index. The subject-head rule combines Holmes with mencoba membuka palang itu and identifies the ARG0 value of Holmes with the ARG1 values in both V1 and V2. This is illustrated in Figure 1.

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Figure 1: Parse tree and DMRS representation of a control SVC

Figure 2: Parse tree and DMRS representation of a raising SVC

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Raising SVC. The raising phenomenon is where a syntactic argument’s semantic index is not linked to

any semantic argument position in a given lexical entry’s semantic relation, but is instead assigned to a role in the semantics of another syntactic argument of the lexical entry. In a raising construction, the head daughter (V1) can have two syntactic arguments, an NP (as SUBJ) and a VP (as COMPS), as in (13). V1 does not do anything semantically with its subject. Sag et al. (2003:366) use ‘active-passive pairs’ which have essentially the same meaning. V1 identifies the external argument (XARG) of V2 with the subject’s index. However, it takes the proposition introduced by V2 as its only semantic argument, rather than assigning a second semantic role to the subject’s index. The local top (LTOP) is identified with the first argument (ARG1) in the lexical relation (KEYREL) introduced by the verb. This is illustrated in (17). The head-complement rule unifies V1’s constraints on its complement with those of V2 and identifies the subject’s index with the XARG value of V2. The subject-head rule combines the subject waktu “time” with the VP terasa berlalu “seems passing” and identifies the ARG0 value of the subject with the ARG1 in V2.

5.2 Serial verbs with other semantic relationships

The result in Section 4.2 shows us that V1 in the manner, purpose, and coordinated action SVCs can be any verbs other than control and raising verbs and there are ambiguities in the semantic relationships. Because of this, we made rules based on the transitivity and we introduce semantic relations svc_p_rel, svc_coord_p_rel, and svc_result_p_rel.

V1 is intransitive. In an SVC where the V1 is intransitive, V1 (the head daughter, HEAD-DTR)

and V2 (NON-HEAD-DTR) share the same subject (SUBJ) but not the same object. The V1 is assumed not having an object and thus in the valence (VAL), the COMPS has the value null. The object, if there is any, is the argument of V2 (the COMPS is not null). Here we introduce a new relation (RELS) svc_p_rel having two arguments. Its first argument (ARG1) is identified with the index of the head daughter (V1), while its second argument (ARG2) is identified with the index of V2. The label (LBL) is identified with the local top (LTOP) of V1. This is illustrated in (18). The head-complement rule unifies V2 with its object. The SVC rule unifies V1 and V2 (with its object argument) and propagates up the constraints on the subject from the head daughter pulang “return home” to the verb phrase pulang melalui halaman itu “go home by passing through that yard”. The semantics of this verb phrase retain the semantic properties of its daughters and the svc_p_rel predicate relation. The subject-head rule combines saya “I” with pulang melalui halaman itu and identifies the ARG0 of the subject with the ARG1 of V1 and V2. This is illustrated in Figure 3.

V1 and V2 are transitive with a shared object. In this SVC, both V1 and V2 share the same

subject (SUBJ) and the same object (COMPS). V2 is the syntactic head (HEAD-DTR), but semantically the svc_coord_p_rel is the head. The left index (L-INDEX) and the right index (R-INDEX) of svc_coord_p_rel are identified with the index of V1 and V2, treating the semantics the same as “V1 and V2”. This is illustrated in (19). The SVC rule unifies V1 memukul “beat up” and V2 mengeroyok “gang up” and propagates up the constraints on the object Budi and the subject mereka “they”. The head-complement rule unifies V1+V2 with their shared object and identifies the ARG0 of the object with the ARG2 of V1 and V2. The subject-head rule combines the shared subject with the VP and identifies the ARG0 of the subject with the ARG1 of V1 and V2 (see Figure 4).

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V1 is transitive and V2 is intransitive, having a resultative meaning. This SVC is a particular

construction with regard to the transitivity of V1 and V2 and the semantic relationship. V1 is a transitive verb its subject (SUBJ) and object (COMPS), being the same as the subject and the object of the SVC respectively. V2 is an intransitive verb, its subject (SUBJ), corresponding to the object of the SVC. V2 does not have an object and thus the value of its COMPS is null. In terms of semantic relation (RELS), it is resultative and thus we posit a new relation svc_result_p_rel. Its ARG1 and ARG2 are identified with the indices of V1 and V2 respectively. Its label (LBL) is identified with the local top (LTOP) of V1. This is illustrated in (20). The SVC rule unifies V1 membunuh “kill” and V2 mati “die”. The head- complement rule unifies V1 with its object (also V2 with its subject argument) and identifies the ARG0 of the SVC’s object with the ARG1 of V2 and the ARG2 of V1. The subject-head rule combines the SVC’s subject with the VP and identifies the ARG0 of the subject with the ARG1 of V1 (see Figure 5 on the next page).

Figure 3: Parse tree and DMRS representation of Example (12)

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Figure 4: Parse tree and DMRS representation of Example (6)

Figure 5: Parse tree and DMRS representation of Example (8)