Bresnan, Kaplan, Peters & Zaenen (1982) #

[BKPZ82]

Cross-Serial Dependencies in Dutch. In The Formal Complexity of Natural Language, 286–319.

In Dutch subordinate clauses, multiple NPs precede multiple verbs with cross-serial (not nested) dependencies:

NP₁ NP₂ NP₃ V₁ V₂ V₃ └────────────┘ └────────────┘ └────────────┘

German verb clusters show the nested (context-free) pattern instead:

NP₁ NP₂ NP₃ V₃ V₂ V₁ └────────────────────┘ └────────────┘ └────┘

Main declarations #

VerbClusterExample: an example sentence with its NP-verb binding permutation (Features.VerbClusterBinding)
dutch_2np_2v, dutch_3np_3v, dutch_4np_4v, german_3np_3v: the standard paradigm
dutch_3_is_crossSerial, german_3_is_nested: the binding patterns derived from the permutations

Attribution #

[BKPZ82] described the Dutch data; their non-context-freeness argument relied on constituency assumptions. [GP82] showed bare cross-serial word order is context-free (formalized in PullumGazdar1982); [Shi85] proved Swiss-German case-marked cross-serial dependencies non-context-free as a string set (formalized in Shieber1985). The example sentences here are the standard paradigm as cited in the literature; the exact wording has not been verified against the 1982 paper.

source

structure BresnanEtAl1982.VerbClusterExample :

Type

A verb cluster example with NP-verb dependency data.

Used for both Dutch cross-serial and German nested dependency patterns. Surface string, gloss, and translation document the example; the binding encodes the structural claim as a permutation σ : Fin n → Fin n. The dependency pattern is derived from the binding via binding.pattern.

n : ℕ
Number of NP-verb pairs
language : String
Language name
surface : String
Surface string
gloss : String
English gloss
translation : String
English translation
nps : List String
NPs in order
verbs : List String
Verbs in order
binding : Features.VerbClusterBinding self.n
The NP-verb binding permutation