Editing Dependency grammar (section)

===Semantic dependencies===
Semantic dependencies are understood in terms of [[predicate (grammar)|predicate]]s and their [[Argument (linguistics)|argument]]s.<ref>Concerning semantic dependencies, see Melʹc̆uk (2003:192f.).</ref> The arguments of a predicate are semantically dependent on that predicate. Often, semantic dependencies overlap with and point in the same direction as syntactic dependencies. At times, however, semantic dependencies can point in the opposite direction of syntactic dependencies, or they can be entirely independent of syntactic dependencies. The hierarchy of words in the following examples show standard syntactic dependencies, whereas the arrows indicate semantic dependencies:

[[File:Semantic dependencies.png|center|Semantic dependencies]]

The two arguments ''Sam'' and ''Sally'' in tree (a) are dependent on the predicate ''likes'', whereby these arguments are also syntactically dependent on ''likes''. What this means is that the semantic and syntactic dependencies overlap and point in the same direction (down the tree). Attributive adjectives, however, are predicates that take their head noun as their argument, hence ''big'' is a predicate in tree (b) that takes ''bones'' as its one argument; the semantic dependency points up the tree and therefore runs counter to the syntactic dependency. A similar situation obtains in (c), where the preposition predicate ''on'' takes the two arguments ''the picture'' and ''the wall''; one of these semantic dependencies points up the syntactic hierarchy, whereas the other points down it. Finally, the predicate ''to help'' in (d) takes the one argument ''Jim'' but is not directly connected to ''Jim'' in the syntactic hierarchy, which means that semantic dependency is entirely independent of the syntactic dependencies.