A treebank-driven investigation of predicative complements in Dutch : An efficient, practical, actually usable approach

Abstract

Treebanks are used for various purposes in language technology, but the wealth of data they contain can also be put to good use for the purpose of linguistic description and linguistic theory. To demonstrate this I will show how the treebank of the Spoken Dutch Corpus can be exploited to improve our understanding of what it is that distinguishes predicative complements from other types of complements. Section 1 shows why this distinction matters, section 2 provides a brief presentation of the treebank, section 3 gives a comprehensive survey of the intransitive predicate selecting verbs, based on the treebank data, section 4 presents a number of factors which can be used to differentiate the predicate selecting uses of the relevant verbs from their other uses, and section 5 summarizes the results.