Annotating “Absolute” Preverbs in the Homeric and Vedic Treebanks

Indo-European preverbs are uninflected morphemes attaching to verbs and modifying their meaning. In Early Vedic and Homeric Greek, these morphemes held ambiguous morphosyntactic status raising issues for syntactic annotation. This paper focuses on the annotation of preverbs in so-called “absolute” position in two Universal Dependencies treebanks. This issue is related to the broader topic of how to annotate ellipsis in Universal Dependencies. After discussing some of the current annotations, we propose a new scheme that better accounts for the variety of absolute constructions.