---
title: "Depictives in English: An LTAG Approach (2017)"
description: "They then compare three designs for resolving the target: in syntax, in semantics, or at the syntax-semantics interface. 21 references."
authors: ["Benjamin Burkhardt", "Timm Lichte", "Laura Kallmeyer"]
year: 2017
venue: "Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W17-6203/"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/burkhardt-2017-depictives-english-ltag-approach/"
---
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# Depictives in English: An LTAG Approach

**Authors:** Benjamin Burkhardt, Timm Lichte and [Laura Kallmeyer](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/laura-kallmeyer/) · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W17-6203/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W17-6203.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2757663171)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Depictive secondary predicates, such as *raw* in "Kim ate the steak raw", describe a participant's state during the event. They do not form a constituent with that participant. Instead they attach to the verbal domain and must find their target at a distance.

The paper asks two questions: how a grammar can link a depictive to its target, and why only some arguments can serve as targets. Working in Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar, the authors first survey English data:
- target ambiguity;
- stacking of depictives;
- targets that are not overtly realized, such as passive agents and dropped objects;
- the general unavailability of indirect objects, PP-objects, possessors, conjuncts and adjuncts as targets.

They then compare three designs for resolving the target: in syntax, in semantics, or at the syntax-semantics interface. They also reject a multi-component TAG variant.

The preferred solution is semantic and builds on Van Valin's actor–undergoer linking. It predicts that only these two macroroles can be targeted. This is the first TAG treatment of secondary predication, and it offers a principled constraint, although its empirical base is still preliminary.

## Key points
- Depictives differ from resultatives. A depictive's property holds for at least part of the event time. A resultative's state is caused by the event, as in "stomped the can flat".
- Following Geuder, the depictive is analysed as adjoined at the VP level. Subject and object targets are not given separate attachment sites in the favoured account.
- The data show several patterns:
  - Unrealized arguments can be targets, e.g. the agent in "The game was played barefoot".
  - Obliques mostly cannot, e.g. "The cash machine gave John the money hungry" has no reading where John is hungry.
  - Apparent exceptions are attributed to light-verb or verb-particle constructions.
- In stacking, an object depictive followed by a subject depictive (well-nested order) is judged more acceptable than an ill-nested order or two depictives sharing one target.
- MCTAG is set aside mainly because the target may be unrealized, leaving no NP for part of the tree set to land on. Corpus and acceptability studies are announced as future work.

## Interesting ideas
- The set of possible targets is defined by semantic macroroles (actor and undergoer) rather than by syntactic slots, so passivization can make a PP-object targetable ("Chris was crashed into unprepared").
- Arguments that are never spelled out, such as a passive agent or an omitted object ("we usually bake gluten-free"), can still bear a predicated state.
- Target ambiguity is handled in semantics rather than by multiplying syntactic derivations, which keeps one structure and lets meaning choose the target.
- The temporal profile separates the two predicate types: depictive properties overlap the event, while resultative states follow from it.
- Clear judgments come from minimal pairs where world knowledge rules out a reading, such as an inanimate machine being hungry or a steak being hungry.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (frames): When linking a secondary predicate to a participant, restrict candidates to the frame's actor and undergoer from VerbNet roles rather than to the UD subject or object.
- **I2** (world): Introduce implicit participants for passives and object-drop verbs so that states like "barefoot" have an entity to attach to in the world of the text.
- **I3** (tree): Keep a single attachment for depictive-like adjectives in the UD tree and pass the choice of target to later stages, instead of forking parses.
- **I4** (world): Timestamp states from secondary predicates differently, holding during the event for depictives and after it for resultatives, to support correct event ordering.
- **I5** (learn): Build contrastive sentence pairs like these as negative controls when evaluating depictive-target linking, so that errors cannot hide behind lucky defaults.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Benjamin Burkhardt, Timm Lichte and Laura Kallmeyer. 2017. Depictives in English: An LTAG Approach. Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{burkhardt2017depictives,
  title = {{Depictives in English: An LTAG Approach}},
  author = {Benjamin Burkhardt, Timm Lichte and Laura Kallmeyer},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms},
  year = {2017},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W17-6203/}
}
```

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## References

21 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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16. Neville Ryant and Tatjana Scheffler. 2006. Binding of anaphors in LTAG. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms. Sydney, Australia, pages 65–72. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W06/W06-1509. [↗](https://aclanthology.org/W06-1509/)
17. Yves Schabes and Stuart M. Shieber. 1994. [An Alternative Conception of Tree-Adjoining Derivation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schabes-1994-alternative-conception-tree-adjoining-derivation/). Computational Linguistics 20(1):91–124.
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*Updated 2 November 2026*