A Historical Overview of the Status of Function Words in Dependency Grammar

This contribution provides a historical overview of the analysis of function words in surface syntactic dependency hierarchies. Starting with Tesnière (1959), the overview progresses through some prominent voices in the history of DG (Mel'čuk 1958, 1963, Hays 1964, Matthews 1981, Schubert 1987, Maxwell and Schubert 1989, Hudson 1976, 1984, etc.). The overview establishes that the analysis of prepositions has been almost unanimous: they are positioned as heads over their nouns. There has been more variation concerning the status of auxiliary verbs, although most DG grammarians have viewed them as heads over their content verbs. Concerning determiners, the dominant position is that they are dependents under their nouns, although there are a couple of prominent voices that assume the opposite stance. 1 The dependency status of function words The distinction between function words and content words has been made by linguists of various backgrounds. A rough definition of the distinction might be that content words can be understood without any supporting context whereas function words cannot. The discussion in this article takes place in terms of specific syntactic categories which happen to be function words according to this definition. A recent proposal for surface analyses of dependencies categorically subordinates function words to content words. Universal Stanford Dependencies (USD) (de Marneffe et al. 2014) advocate an annotation scheme that positions auxiliary verbs, adpositions, subordinators, and determiners as dependents of the content words with which they co-occur. Thus according to this scheme, the DG analysis of the sentence The kids have eaten at school would be as follows: (1) eaten