Let's Do It Orderly: A Proposal for a Better Taxonomy of Adverbs in Universal Dependencies, and Beyond

With this paper, we hope to highlight the critical issues and “bad practices” that are currently observed in the representation of adverbs in the annotation framework of Universal Dependencies (where they are ideally identified with the universal part of speech ADV), which themselves more generally mirror the conspicuous lack of systematic definitions of this word class in traditional grammars. This fact, on the one side, hampers a useful and meaningful linguistic description of adverbs in Universal Dependencies’ treebanks and beyond, and, on the other side, has unfortunate consequences for linguistic research, such as too confused, impractical results when, for example, querying a treebank for all ADV-tagged words. Therefore, with the aid of minimal data analysis and numerous examples, this contribution tries to raise awareness about this issue, and proposes a revised, more typologically grounded and general framework for the classification of adverbs in Universal Dependencies, and more broadly advocates a more flexible representation of the interplay between word classes and syntactic functions, through the comprehensive concept of “transposition” or “transfer”. While grounded in the Universal Dependencies formalism, the scope of the discussion of this paper is by no means limited to it, and might be of interest to any practitioner of (computationally-oriented) linguistic annotation.