Dependency Structures and Beyond: Assembling Drawings of Sentence Construction

Abstract

This paper purports to propose a concise system of symbols to illustrate the sentence construction through assembling drawings, in which chunks are attached step by step according to their semantic dependency relations into a partial structure, which ultimately develops into the complete structure. The assembling drawings, purporting as a supplementary yet more linearized notation of dependency structures, use semantic streams to represent the semantic dependency relations, which indicate the objective movement within a sentence; while the attachment of chunks represents the word order, indicating the subjective movement. The sentence construction is accomplished at the point when all the chunks can be integrated, and the semantic streams merge together. The performance of the assembling drawings is investigated and exemplified with a diversity of Mandarin Chinese and English sentences.