Chapter 4

Microsyntactic annotation

This chapter describes the microsyntactic analysis of the Rhapsodie corpus in terms of dependency syntax. Microsyntax studies the relations between words that are characterized by a strong syntactic cohesion, traditionally called “government”. The different steps in the annotation are presented: segmentation into words and labeling in parts of speech, dependency structure, and basic syntactic functions. We justify our decision to use a small set of tags without redundancies, but to introduce a predicative relation for elements that form a complex predicate including copula, auxiliaries, and some modal verbs. Complex cases of annotations such as extraction (relative and interrogative clauses, cleft sentences) and negation are also presented. In addition, we show how a constituent structure can be computed from the dependency structure.