Graph Theory - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 176

9.3 Sharing in Relative Clauses

Can our system as defined so far deal with difficult constructions of natural
language, and by extension difficult constructions of content? As a case in
point, let us consider center-embedded relative clauses of German.
Relative clauses function as sentential adnominal modifiers (Sect. 11.5), in
contradistinction to adverbial clauses, which modify the verb (Sect. 11.6). As
a brief introduction to relative clauses in DBS, compare the following SRGs
of five relative clauses with their corresponding main clauses:

9.3.1 M AIN CLAUSES AND EQUIVALENT RELATIVE CLAUSES

main clause

love love

sleep

11 211 211

man woman woman man

man

The man sleeps. The man loves a woman. A woman loves the man.

relative clause

man man man

211

11 211

sleep love love

The man who sleeps

woman woman

The man who loves a woman The man whom a woman loves

main clause

give give

3111 3111

man woman flower woman man kiss

The man gives the woman a flower. The woman gives the man a kiss.

relative clause

man man

give give

3111

3111

woman flower woman kiss