Open Access

The present paper reports two acceptability-rating experiments and a supporting corpus study for Polish that tested the acceptability and frequency of five verb classes (WATCH, SEE, HATE, KNOW, EXHIBIT), entailing different sets of agentivity features, in different syntactic constructions: a) the personal passive (e.g. zachód słońca był oglądany ‘the sunset was watched’), b) the impersonal -no/-to construction (e.g. oglądano zachód słońca ‘people/they/one watched the sunset’), and c) the personal active construction (e.g. niektórzy oglądali zachód słońca ‘some (people) watched the sunset’). We asked whether acceptability ratings would show identical acceptability clines across constructions affected by agentivity, as predicted from Dowty’s (1991) prototype account of semantic roles with feature accumulation as its central mechanism, or whether clines would vary depending on syntactic construction, as predicted from Himmelmann & Primus’ (2015) prominence account that uses feature weighting to describe role-related effects. In contrasting the applicability of these two accounts, we also investigated whether previous research findings from German replicate in Polish, thereby revealing cross-linguistic stability or variation. Our results show that the five verb classes yield different acceptability clines in all three Polish constructions and that the clines for Polish and German passives show cross-linguistic variation. This pattern cannot be explained by role prototypicality, so that the experiments provide further evidence for the prominence account of role-related effects in sentence interpretation. Moreover, our data suggest that experiencer verbs interact differently with the animacy of the subject referent, yielding different results for perception verbs (SEE), emotion verbs (HATE), and cognition verbs (KNOW).

This article presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena which cause difficulties in the analysis of user-generated texts found on the web and in social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework of syntactic analysis. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this article is twofold: (1) to provide a condensed, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks—based on available literature—along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The overarching goal of this article is to provide a common framework for researchers interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus promoting cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been central to the spirit of UD.

In diesem Beitrag widmen wir uns der Frage, welche Schritte unternommen werden müssen, um Skripte, die bei der Aufbereitung und/oder Auswertung von Forschungsdaten Anwendung finden, so FAIR wie möglich zu gestalten. Dabei nehmen wir sowohl Reproduzierbarkeit, also den Weg von den (Roh)daten zu den Ergebnissen einer Studie, als auch Wiederverwertbarkeit, also die Möglichkeit, die Methoden einer Studie mittels des Skripts auf andere Daten anzuwenden, in den Fokus und beleuchten dabei die folgenden Aspekte: Arbeitsumgebung, Datenvalidierung, Modularisierung, Dokumentation und Lizenz.