The Universal Dependencies (UD) framework aspires to offer a cross-linguistically consistent syntactic annotation scheme. In doing so, it inevitably clashes with concepts defined in traditional descriptions of individual languages (which are often mutually incompatible with traditions held in other languages). This talk focuses on one such problematic concept, the indirect object – a grammatical relation whose presence in the UD taxonomy was inspired by traditional grammars of some Indo-European languages, yet its classification as core argument makes a UD-style “indirect object” quite different from the (intuitively expected) RECIPIENT role in, e.g., Spanish or French. Using data from a range of languages, I show how the ambiguity in the guidelines leads to divergent annotation practices, particularly in constructions involving recipients, benefactives, and goal arguments. While this obviously creates challenges for typological comparison, I will also discuss possible workarounds, as well as potential future rethinking of the UD guidelines with respect to modeling of indirect objects.
Avery D. Andrews (2007): The major functions of the noun phrase. In Timothy Shopen, editor, Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume I: Clause Structure, Cambridge University Press, pages 132–223.
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher Manning, Joakim Nivre, Daniel Zeman (2021): Universal Dependencies. In: Computational Linguistics, ISSN 1530-9312, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 255-308
Martin Haspelmath (2015): Ditransitive Constructions in the World’s Languages. Annual Review of Linguistics. 1. 19-41. 10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-125204.
Daniel Zeman (2017): Core Arguments in Universal Dependencies. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2017), September 18-20, 2017, Università di Pisa, Italy, pp. 287-296, Linköping University Electronic Press, Linköping, Sweden, ISBN 978-91-7685-467-9