Penn Arabic Treebank Guidelines

***Draft, January 28, 2003***

Ann Bies and Mohamed Maamouri

Linguistic Data Consortium

University of Pennsylvania

3600 Market Street, Suite 810

Philadelphia, PA 19104

bies@ldc.upenn.edu, maamouri@ldc.upenn.edu

Table of Contents

1 Basic Arabic clause structure. 4

1.1 Basic sentence structure. 5

1.2 Node labels and functional "dashtags" 6

1.3 VP arguments and adjuncts. 7

1.4 NP arguments and adjuncts. 8

1.5 Empty categories. 8

1.6 Clitics. 9

2 Noun Phrase Structure. 10

2.1 Complements. 10

2.2 Determiners, Quantifiers, and other pre-nominal modification. 12

2.2.1 Quantifiers. 13

2.3 Adjuncts. 13

2.3.1 Names in apposition. 14

2.4 Flat 15

2.5 Numbers. 15

2.6 Resumptive Pronouns. 17

2.7 Relative Clauses. 18

2.8 Discontinuous Constituents/Rightward Movement 19

2.9 Clitics. 20

2.10 A Note on Case Marking. 20

2.11 Difficult NP Structure cases: 21

3 Verb Phrase Structure. 21

3.1 Subjects. 22

3.2 Pre-verbal/Topicalized Subjects. 23

3.3 Objects. 23

3.4 Clitics. 23

3.5 Sentential Complements (S and SBAR) 24

3.6 Adverbial Modification (PP, ADVP, NP-ADV, S-ADV, SBAR-ADV) 24

3.7 Closely Related Prepositional Phrases (PP-CLR) 24

3.8 KANA and her sisters. 24

3.8.1 List of KANA sisters: remain, become, seem, etc. 24

3.8.2 List of kAna and Sisters in Arabic: 24

3.9 kAna as an Auxiliary Verb. 25

3.10 Serial Verbs. 25

3.11 Passive Verbs. 26

3.12 Middle Verbs. 26

3.13 Floating Quantifiers. 26

4 Coordination. 26

4.1 Initial wa. 27

4.2 Gapping (VP Template Gapping) 29

5 Subordinate Clauses. 29

5.1 Verbs of "Saying" 29

5.1.1 Direct Speech. 29

5.1.2 Indirect Speech. 29

5.2 Expletive structures – >ana hu. 30

5.3 Relative Clauses. 34

5.3.1 Resumptive pronouns in relative clauses. 35

5.3.2 Coordination. 35

5.3.3 Free Relatives. 35

5.3.4 Special cases. 36

5.4 SBAR vs. SBAR-ADV.. 36

5.5 S vs. S-ADV.. 36

5.6 PP vs. SBAR.. 37

5.7 Flat multi-word complementizers. 37

5.8 Small Clauses.