I was discussing with @ebender how to get an MRS for “book page 1,” and she would expect that it works similarly to a title and name, like “Dr. Bender,” where “book page” is the title and “1” is the name.
We tried to parse the cat likes chapter one and pick out the right result, but couldn’t tell at a glance. I got too many results to make it reasonable to include in this post, but if desired I can paste them in a comment.
Does the ERG have that type of construction and if so what would the MRS look like?
Yes, the ERG does include an analysis of this construction, and @ebender remembers correctly that “page 1” is treated, analogously to “Dr. Bender”, as a compound noun phrase, where the second daughter is a proper name or a number identifying an individual, and the first daughter is a common noun providing the class of the individual. The name of the syntactic construction is np-hdn_ttl-cpd_c (succinctly indicating that the construction consists of an NP followed by a head-noun, producing a title-compound). The associated MRS for this construction introduces an ordinary compound_rel linking the indices of the two nominal daughters. The grammar could of course introduce a more construction-specific predication instead of “compound_rel” for these title-constructions, if we had an idea of what that more helpful predication should be called. To study this construction, you might restrict the parser to produce only full-sentence analyses, by invoking ACE with the additional parameter “-r root_informal”, or you might instead parse the sentence “the cat devoured chapter two.” to avoid the lexical and structural ambiguity you encountered with “the cat likes chapter one” (where “like” can be a noun, and “one” has more lexical analyses than one might expect).
Since I already have compounds working, getting this to work was easy enough, thanks!
However, I am getting some additional outputs when generating:
Chapter two
Chapter next couple
Chapter past couple
Chapter two.
Chapter next couple.
Chapter past couple.
When parsing “chapter two” or “chapter next couple” the MRS seems to be the same so I don’t expect there to be a way to get rid of these ones that say “couple,” but if there is a way then that would be great.