Syntactic annotation of non-canonical linguistic structures

This paper deals with the syntactic annotation of corpora that contain both ‘canonical’ and ‘non-canonical’ sentences. Consider Examples (1) and (2) from the German learner corpus Falko which will be introduced below. (1) represents a syntactically correct (although perhaps not very enlightening) utterance to which it is easy to assign a syntactic structure. The utterance in (2), on the other hand, would be considered incorrect (and probably be interpreted as a word order error) – it is much more difficult to assign a syntactic structure to it. The question is: how can (1) and (2) be annotated in a uniform way that shows that there is a difference and makes clear exactly where that difference lies?

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