janabeck/Annotald — Issue #12: Moving traces around
Author: aecay
Created: 2011-12-16 09:03:33+00:00
State: open
Labels: enhancement

It is possible to move silent categories (traces, comeents, ...) with the usual right-click-to-move operation (IcePaHC annotald doesn't let you do this). But it is not possible to change their position within the same mother node. Sometimes, my tagging script mistakenly puts the trace of wh-movement at the sentence level, when it should be embedded under some constituent. Say that we have this structure and we want to get the NP-trace after the P:

(IP (NP *T*)
(PP (P xxx))
...)

Since the trace precedes the PP in the original structure, moving it under the PP will cause it to be first. We have to move it from a position after the PP. The hack I use is to move it to some branching node after the PP (creating one if needed), then move it into the PP.

I'm not sure if we should have a way to change the linear order of traces. Maybe if so, we only need to allow toggling between phrase-initial and phrase-final position (would it ever make sense to have a phrase-medial trace?). In any case, I am making this issue to document the problem (/hacky solution) and see what people think about the necessity of finer-grained trace-moving capabilities.