Dependency Search In Korp

In Korp you may perform quite advanced corpus serches. Here is a more thorough introduction, but this document comtains some additinoal examples.

Searching with dependency relations

Task: You want to search for all sentences with nouns in Illative that have the verb liikot as their dependency mother.

Procedure: Write the string below into the CQP search interface in Korp.

The search string is as follows (here, it is put on 3 lines):

a:[msd="N.*.Ill"]
[]{0,10}
b:[lemma="liikot" & msd="V.*"]
::a.dephead=b.ref

Explanation:

This expression

[lemma="liikot" & msd="V.*"]

identifies the verb, by giving lemma and part of speech.

[]{0,10}

this gives zero or more whatever inbetween the two expressions

then the noun, its grammatical specification (singular or plural) and its dependency relation.

[msd="N.*.Ill" & deprel="OBJ"]

Then you have to bind these groups to some variable names, the syntax is name:expression, as follows:

b:BUNDLE
a:BUNDLE

then you state a joint condition referring to both a and b with :: as a delimiter symbol:

::a.dephead=b.ref

This declares that the dependeny head of a shall be the ref value of b (the word that has b as an index). In our context, the dependency head of the illative noun shall be the verb liikot.

The order is now fixed to N + V. You may switch it, as follows:

b:[lemma="liikot" & msd="V.*"]
[]{0,10}
a:[msd="N.*.Ill"]
::a.dephead=b.ref

Note that b and aare kept.