He was site testing the equipment.
The equipment was site tested.
He was flame cutting the pedestal.
The pedestal was flame cut.
He was cold sawing the parts.
The end was cold sawn.
New, more specific, verbs are fabricated out of an existing verb and a property. We couldn’t hope to have all these specialised verbs – participles, tenses and the like, so we have to recognise them when they appear.
If we find a verb auxiliary, an adjective or noun, and a participle, we go looking for a property that would allow verb fabrication.
Example 1
He was site testing the equipment.
ToTest has a location – it is a child of the locations for Site, Workshop, Bench. We swallow "site", making the relation have that location, so the sentence becomes
He was testing (on site) the equipment.
We can swallow the property within the verb, so it behaves just like the normal ToTest.
Many relations carry a ToUse relation – the things that are used in that relation. ToTest uses tools, equipment ("test equipment"), procedures, plans (so we know what a "test plan" is).
Example 2
He was flame cutting the pedestal.
ToCut uses various things to cut - knife, laser, flame. We swallow "flame", making the particular "cut" relation use "flame" and not the others. Now we are back to the generic verb, and have all its components available. The sentence becomes
He was cutting (using flame) the pedestal.
He was cold sawing the parts.
ToSaw uses various things to saw – one of them is a cold saw. We see that the object has a name which includes the action, and it would not be reasonable to say
He was cold saw sawing the parts.
We swallow the word "cold", and make the relation use "cold saw".
We need to ignore
The flame cutting the rope
But catch
The flame cutting of the steel.
The flame cutting the man was waiting for was not yet completed.
The diagram shows a FabricatedVerbPhrase, with site (which can also be a verb) swallowed within the "to test" infinitive. The possibility was detected at the word level, and confirmed by semantics at a higher level - the parse object between site and test acquired the MiddleFabricatedVerb property to indicate the possibility.
Forms in which the fabricated verb can appear:
(not an example)The site tested equipment was damaged.
He thought the site tested equipment.
Another example of how semantics is tied up with grammar to handle assemblies of words.
This is part of a more general handling of participles.