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<Paper uid="W97-0307">
  <Title>Tagging Grammatical Functions</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Annotation Scheme
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Existing treebanks of English ((Marcus et al., 1994), (Sampson, 1995), (Black et al., 1996)) contain conventional phrase-structure trees augmented with annotations for discontinuous constituents. As this encoding strategy is not well-suited to a free word order language like German, we have focussed on a less surface-oriented level of description, most closely related to the LFG f-structure, and representations used in dependency grammar. To avoid confusion with theory-specific constructs, we use the generic term argument structure to refer to our annotation format. The main advantages of the model are: it is relatively theory-independent and closely related to semantics. For more details on the linguistic specifications of the annotation scheme see (Skut et al., 1997). A similar approach has been also successfully applied in the TSNLP database, cf. (Lehmann et al., 1996).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In contrast to conventional phrase-structure grammars, argument structure annotations are not influenced by word order. Local and non-local dependencies are represented in the same way, the latter indicated by crossing branches in the hierarchical structure, as shown in figure 1 where in the VP the terminals of the direct object OA (den Traum yon der kleinen Gastst~tte) are not adjacent to the head HD aufgegeben 1. For a related handling  of non-projective phenomena see (Tapanainen and J/irvinen, 1997).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Such a representation permits clear separation of word order (in the surface string) and syntactic dependencies (in the hierarchical structure). Thus we avoid explicit explanatory statements about the complex interrelation between word order and syntactic structure in free word order languages. Such statements are generally theory-specific and therefore are not appropriate for a descriptive approach to annotation. The relation between syntactic dependencies and surface order can nontheless be inferred from the data. This provides a promising way of handling free word order phenomena. 2.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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