Annotating Adjuncts

Adjuncts are dependents of predicates that are not arguments – that is, they are not assigned a role by the predicate, but by the adjunct construction, often involving an adposition or a conjunction. All kinds of predicates can have adjuncts, including verbs, nouns, and others. Superframes does not try to distinguish between adjuncts and non-core arguments – we annotate the former just like the latter:

Attributive Adjectives and Adverbs

Attributive adjectives and adverbs behave syntactically like modifiers, but they are also predicates assigning the modifiee a role. In fact, the semantic relation that this modifier relation denotes is that the modifier evokes a scene in which the modifiee participates. We have already encountered the frame that encodes this relation in the chapter on Annotating Dynamic Verbs: it is called META. With attributive adjectives and adverbs, we use its scene role as a non-core role, and we add a backlink for the role assigned by the modifier to the modifiee.

Important

If a predicate has a SCENE dependent, then an additional dependency edge (not present in basic UD) must be present from the dependent to the predicate. This edge is called a backlink. This rule is enforced automatically by the checker.

Relative Clauses

Relative clauses work very similarly to attributive adjectives and adverbs: they modify a predicate (usually a noun), but also act as predicates assigning that noun a role. Again, we use SCENE and add a backlink to the modified noun.

Note that relative pronouns and stranded prepositions are annotated with the same role as the antecedent.

Note also that relative clauses need not be finite, but can, e.g., be headed by participles:

Note also that the backlink need not go directly from the head of the relative clause, but can also have a more deeply embedded source:

Relation Nominal Adjuncts

Relational nouns can likewise function as adjuncts assigning the modifiee a role. If there is an adposition, its semantic contribution is weak.