Simultaneous Amalgamation - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 162

Here the query contains two question marks, and the return is the whole token
line of decide . 17 In this query answer, the list starts with the most frequent.

8.6 Appear, Promise, and Persuade Class Infinitives

There are the following content structures corresponding to an infinitive con-
struction in English:

8.6.1 C ONTENT STRUCTURES CORRESPONDING TO INFINITIVES

1. Infinitive as subject: To err is human, to forgive divine.
2. Infinitive as object: John tried to read a book.
3. Infinitive as adnominal modifier: the desire to help
4. Bare infinitive: 18 Peter saw the accident happen.

(1) is largely restricted to copula constructions (e.g., 7.5.5 and 7.5.6). (2) has
been illustrated in Sect. 8.4. (3) is a post-nominal variant of the V | N relation

(7.6.4, 10). (4) has the following DBS graph analysis:

8.6.2 B ARE INFINITIVE : Peter saw the accident happen.

(i) semantic relations graph (SRG) (iii) numbered arcs graph (NAG)

see see

6

3

happen 1 happen

2

45

Peter accident Peter accident

(ii) signature

V

(iv) surface realization

V

1 2 3−4

the__accident

5 6

.

N N

Peter saw happen

17 Selectional constellations for given natural languages are of special interest in machine translation
(cf. Kay 1984, Dorr 1993, and Wu and Palmer 1994, among many others). Storing selectional con-
stellations in a Corpus Word Bank may support this application by providing efficient and highly
differentiated retrieval based on pattern proplets which utilize semantic relations.
18 Bare infinitives are so called because they lack the to . Modal constructions, as in Peter can see the
horizon. , do not reflect a separate kind of infinitive content construction and are treated like auxiliary
constructions in DBS. Cf. FoCL'99, Sect. 17.3; NLC'06, Sect. 6.4.