Question on requirement for 'aux' not to have children (Tswana) about docs HOT 6 CLOSED

The assumption in UD is that verbs form a unit with their auxiliaries (making it similar to languages where the function of the auxiliary is carried just by morphology of the main verb), and dependents (including expl dependents) should be attached directly to the root node of that unit.

This includes situations where the dependent could not be present without the auxiliary. (I can think of examples from other languages where the other dependent is also an auxiliary; I'm not sure I can come up with an example with expl, but there is no reason why it should be treated differently.)

from docs.

Might be good to include some more examples under function word modifiers

from docs.

Thanks for these insights! We have now adapted the annotations to link the expl dependents to the main verb.

from docs.

Resolved for Tswana for now.

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I just add that as soon as your UD treebank will be published, it will be converted into SUD (Surface-Syntact UD) and it will be available on Grew-Match. See https://universal.grew.fr/[email protected].
In SUD, the AUX will be the head of the verbal complex and according to the heuristic we use, the expletive before the AUX will depend on the AUX, which is the surface syntactic analysis that you want. Nevertheless, you are invited to verify that the conversion is really ok, because it is easy to decide what really depends on the AUX and what depends on the VERB and sometimes our heuristics don't work. It was the case at least for German and Wolof and we apply special Grew grammars for the conversion in these cases.
Of course, this invitation to check the SUD version of your treebank is not limited to Tswana. If you see any problem in a SUD treebank converted automatically, please contact @bguil and me.

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@sylvainkahane Thanks for this information. We will definitely check it out once the treebank is published.

from docs.