The Syntactic relation field specifies the syntactic characteristics that the lemma and/or word form should have. These characteristics can be set in two ways. The first way is to select the items in the list, which opens via the “Select” link.

To indicate the syntactic relation of a word to another word, you need to select the syntactic role of the word and the direction of the syntactic link. The syntactic role is a characteristic of a word. Each word can have only one syntactic role. Syntactic roles are grouped into 5 types: principal parts of the sentence, secondary parts of the sentence, simple sentence complication, function words, and complex sentence. The principal parts of the sentence include subjects and predicates. Secondary parts of the sentence include objects, attributes, and adverbial modifiers. Function words are the syntactic characteristics of prepositions and conjunctions. The simple sentence complication group includes characteristics corresponding to complex syntactic phenomena such as vocatives, discursive particles and interjections.

Tick the desired characteristics of the word forms in the list.

As soon as you specify the syntactic role of the word, you need to set the direction of the syntactic link by selecting one of the options under the “Syntactic relations” field.

Users who are able to write queries using markup tags can set syntactic characteristics by typing the necessary tags in the field. In the “Syntactic relations” field, you can use logical operator “OR”, set with the | sign, as well as logical “AND”, set with the & sign or a single space (any number of spaces around the | and & signs is allowed). When writing complex expressions, parentheses are used. For example, iobj & (partp | gerp) means an object in dative or instrumental case as a part of a participial or adverbial phrase.

Syntactic roles are mutually exclusive, so whenever you choose more than one syntactic role, it is interpreted as a query with logical “OR”. The “Invert selection” button allows you to invert the marked characteristics, that is, change the selected ones to unselected ones, and vice versa. This is a way to express logical “NOT”: for example, to search for non-argument dependents, you need to tick all syntactic roles except arguments.

You can learn more about the syntactic markup in the Main, National media and other corpora in the article.