ERG handling for "the leather captain's chair"?

grammars ERG
1

I am trying to build an MRS for the leather captain’s chair, but @ebender pointed out to me that this isn’t a true possessive, which is what I was building, and that it’s more of a compound with a “fake” possessive in it morphologically.

When parsing this phrase with the ERG I don’t think I see a result that corresponds to what I want, but I can’t quite tell. Does the ERG handle this?

Here are the MRSs I get:

[ TOP: h0
  INDEX: e2 [ e SF: prop ]
  RELS: < [ unknown<0:27> LBL: h1 ARG: x4 [ x PERS: 3 NUM: sg IND: + ] ARG0: e2 ]
          [ _the_q<0:3> LBL: h5 ARG0: x6 [ x PERS: 3 NUM: sg IND: + ] RSTR: h7 BODY: h8 ]
          [ compound<4:19> LBL: h9 ARG0: e10 [ e SF: prop TENSE: untensed MOOD: indicative PROG: - PERF: - ] ARG1: x6 ARG2: x11 ]
          [ udef_q<4:11> LBL: h12 ARG0: x11 RSTR: h13 BODY: h14 ]
          [ _leather_n_1<4:11> LBL: h15 ARG0: x11 ]
          [ _captain_n_of<12:19> LBL: h9 ARG0: x6 ARG1: i16 ]
          [ def_explicit_q<19:21> LBL: h17 ARG0: x4 RSTR: h18 BODY: h19 ]
          [ poss<19:21> LBL: h20 ARG0: e21 [ e SF: prop TENSE: untensed MOOD: indicative PROG: - PERF: - ] ARG1: x4 ARG2: x6 ]
          [ _chair_n_1<22:27> LBL: h20 ARG0: x4 ] >
  HCONS: < h0 qeq h1 h7 qeq h9 h13 qeq h15 h18 qeq h20 > ]



[ TOP: h0
  INDEX: e2 [ e SF: prop TENSE: pres MOOD: indicative PROG: - PERF: - ]
  RELS: < [ _the_q<0:3> LBL: h4 ARG0: x3 [ x PERS: 3 NUM: sg IND: + ] RSTR: h5 BODY: h6 ]
          [ compound<4:19> LBL: h7 ARG0: e8 [ e SF: prop TENSE: untensed MOOD: indicative PROG: - PERF: - ] ARG1: x3 ARG2: x9 ]
          [ udef_q<4:11> LBL: h10 ARG0: x9 RSTR: h11 BODY: h12 ]
          [ _leather_n_1<4:11> LBL: h13 ARG0: x9 ]
          [ _captain_n_of<12:19> LBL: h7 ARG0: x3 ARG1: i14 ]
          [ _be_v_id<19:21> LBL: h1 ARG0: e2 ARG1: x3 ARG2: x15 [ x PERS: 3 NUM: pl IND: + ] ]
          [ udef_q<22:27> LBL: h16 ARG0: x15 RSTR: h17 BODY: h18 ]
          [ _chair_n_of<22:27> LBL: h19 ARG0: x15 ARG1: i20 ] >
  HCONS: < h0 qeq h1 h5 qeq h7 h11 qeq h13 h17 qeq h19 > ]



[ TOP: h0
  INDEX: e2 [ e SF: prop TENSE: pres MOOD: indicative PROG: - PERF: - ]
  RELS: < [ generic_entity<0:21> LBL: h4 ARG0: x3 [ x PERS: 3 NUM: pl ] ]
          [ _the_q<0:3> LBL: h5 ARG0: x6 [ x PERS: 3 NUM: sg IND: + ] RSTR: h7 BODY: h8 ]
          [ compound<4:19> LBL: h9 ARG0: e10 [ e SF: prop TENSE: untensed MOOD: indicative PROG: - PERF: - ] ARG1: x6 ARG2: x11 ]
          [ udef_q<4:11> LBL: h12 ARG0: x11 RSTR: h13 BODY: h14 ]
          [ _leather_n_1<4:11> LBL: h15 ARG0: x11 ]
          [ _captain_n_of<12:19> LBL: h9 ARG0: x6 ARG1: i16 ]
          [ def_explicit_q<19:21> LBL: h17 ARG0: x3 RSTR: h18 BODY: h19 ]
          [ poss<19:21> LBL: h4 ARG0: e20 [ e SF: prop TENSE: untensed MOOD: indicative PROG: - PERF: - ] ARG1: x3 ARG2: x6 ]
          [ _chair_v_1<22:27> LBL: h1 ARG0: e2 ARG1: x3 ARG2: i21 ] >
  HCONS: < h0 qeq h1 h7 qeq h9 h13 qeq h15 h18 qeq h4 > ]
2

The ERG does include an analysis of this possessive compound construction, but it is dependent on the lexicon including a construction-specific adjectival-possessive entry for each noun that can be the name of a human occupation/profession. Alas, the current lexicon does not supply the entry for “captain’s” that is needed for your example. You can see how the construction works by instead parsing the sentence “we avoided two doctor’s offices”. You’ll see that the lexical entry for “doctor’s” supplies the predication “_doctors_a_1” in the MRS, and the compound construction combining this possessive adjective with the following noun supplies a compound_rel linking the ARG0s of the two daughters. This compounding rule could of course introduce a more construction-specific predication, if we had a good idea of what it should be. The brittleness of having to manually enter all such possessive adjectives into the lexicon will, one hopes, be alleviated once the integration of WordNet synsets into the ERG is complete, since the concept of a human profession or occupation might be associated with a type that can be referred to in the compounding rule.