Unni Cathrine Eiken February 2005

(3- 7)
a. predicate, argument 1, argument 2
b. predicate, argument 1, ?
c. predicate, ?, argument 2
The reason for letting the EPAS consist of a maximum of two arguments is not primarily a
fundamental decision, but rather an emergence from the empirical material that the data
structures were collected from. When extracting EPAS from the data collection, the resulting
structures consisted of a predicate with maximally two arguments. It is probable that there
generally are fewer occurrences of predicates with more than two belonging arguments, and
since my data collection is quite small, such occurrences do not feature in it.
Only nominal arguments are featured in the EPAS; entailing that sentences with a nominal
clause as object will be extracted as an EPAS lacking argument 2. This is clarified through the
examples below:
(3- 8)
Et vitne opplyste at hun hadde hørt høye rop.
A witness informed that she had heard loud screams.
The sentence in example (3-8) above will yield the following three EPAS:
(3- 9)
a. høre, vitne, rop
hear, witness, scream
b. høy, rop, ?
loud, scream, ?
c. opplyse, vitne, ?
inform, witness, ?
(3-9c) does not display an argument 2 despite the fact that the original sentence has a nominal
clause as object. The main reason for this choice of representation is that the subsequent
classifying phase aims at creating classes of nominal arguments, based on the verbs they co-
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