"Proleptic" Arguments in the Greek Treebanks

In this work, we study the construction of the so-called “proleptic arguments” with the help of the morpho-syntactically annotated corpora known as treebanks. Although treebanks should be ideally suited to support corpus-based research on syntactic phenomena, the work is complicated by the controversial nature of the construction and the lack of specific guidelines for its annotation. As a result, “proleptic” arguments are neither consistently annotated nor easily retrievable in the available corpora. In the paper, we address two orders of questions: 1. can we retrieve the relevant passages from the current annotation? 2. Does the evidence offered by the treebanks improve our understanding of this Ancient Greek construction?