Subordinators with Elaborative Meanings in Czech and English

This paper is focused on description of hy­ potactic constructions (constructions with sub­ ordinating conjunctions) with “elaborative” meanings. In dependency­based linguistic lit­ erature, they are referred to as hypotactic co­ ordinations or also (a subset of) false depen­ dent clauses. The analysis makes use of syn­ tax­ and discourse­annotated corpora of Czech and English and thus offers an empirically grounded contrastive study of the phenomena. 1 Motivation and Background One of the basic means of expressing syntactic dependency are subordinating conjunctions (henceforth subordinators). They also signal the semantic type of the dependency relation, i.e. the semantic relation holding between the dependent and the governing clause. Some of them have several semantic interpretations. In this paper, we describe those uses of subordinators that operate between two syntactically dependent but seman­ tically independent contents. In other words, the clause they introduce is formally dependent, but semantically it expresses an elaborative (coordi­ nating, restating, etc.) meaning. For the purposes of this paper, we call them hypotactic coordina­ tions (see Panevová 2012). The analysis is anchored in the theoretical framework of Prague School of structuralism and its extension – functional generative description (FGD, Sgall et al. 1986). It was carried out on 50 thousand Czech sentences from the Prague Dis­ course Treebank, and on a similar amount of English data from the Wall Street Journal – Penn Discourse Treebank. In linguistic theories of dependency, there are several ways of understanding the relation be­ 1 Primarily, the term hypotactic coordination was used on the level of a simple clause description, for constructions such as “mum with dad”. tween formal and semantic principles of a sen­ tence composition. Czech linguistic tradition usually distinguishes hypotaxis and parataxis as two basic formal principles of combining clauses to create a compound sentence. In majority, the linguistic community agrees that hypotaxis cor­ responds mostly to the semantic relation of de­ termination (one clause semantically comple­ ments or enriches the other, building together one content), and parataxis corresponds to the semantic principle of coordination (connecting two semantically autonomous contents – the sec­ ond clause adds some new information to the first clause) (Hrbáček 2000). There are, however, discrepancies between these forms and their functions. Such a phenomenon (correspondence between hypotaxis–determination, parataxis–coordination and also their discrepancies) was described ear­ lier in structuralist works (Karcevskij 1929) and later in FGD for morphological and also syntacti­ cal level of linguistic analysis as asymmetric du­ alism of forms and functions (Panevová 1980, 2012). The phenomenon is depicted in Figure 1. The solid arrows symbolize the most common relations between the form and the meaning, the dashed arrows stand for other relations, i.e. coor­ dination realized in the hypotactic form and de­ termination realized in the paratactic form. meaning: coordination determination form: parataxis hypotaxis Figure 1: A schema of the asymmetric dualism be­ tween formal and semantic relations (Panevová 2012) In the annotation of discourse structure, the ac­ count of semantic types of relations between discourse units deliberately disregards the notion 2 e.g. temporality, causality, contrast