and indented. Like tree (d), the indentations in (g) abstract away from linear order. The point to these conventions is that they are just that, namely conventions. They do not influence the basic commitment to dependency as the relation that is grouping syntactic units. Types of dependencies The dependency representations above (and further below) show syntactic dependencies. Indeed, most work in dependency grammar focuses on syntactic dependencies. Syntactic dependencies are, however, just one of three or four types of dependencies. Meaning–text theory, for instance, emphasizes the role of semantic and morphological dependencies in addition to syntactic dependencies. A fourth type, prosodic dependencies, can also be acknowledged. Distinguishing between these types of dependencies can be important, in part because if one fails to do so, the likelihood that semantic, morphological, and/or prosodic dependencies will be mistaken for syntactic dependencies is great. The following four subsections briefly sketch each of these dependency types. During the discussion, the existence of syntactic dependencies is taken for granted and used as an orientation point for establishing the nature of the other three dependency types. Semantic dependencies Semantic dependencies are understood in terms of predicates and their arguments. The arguments of a predicate are semantically dependent on that predicate. Often, semantic dependencies overlap with and point in the same direction as syntactic dependencies. At times, however, semantic dependencies can point in the opposite direction of syntactic dependencies, or they can be entirely independent of syntactic dependencies. The hierarchy of words in the following examples show standard syntactic dependencies, whereas the arrows indicate semantic dependencies: The two arguments Sam and Sally in tree (a) are dependent on the predicate likes, whereby these arguments are also syntactically dependent on likes. What this means is that the semantic and syntactic dependencies overlap and point in the same direction (down the tree). Attributive adjectives, however, are predicates that take their head noun as their argument, hence big is a predicate in tree (b) that takes bones as its one argument; the semantic dependency points up the tree and therefore runs counter to the syntactic dependency. A similar situation obtains in (c), where the preposition predicate on takes the two arguments the picture and the wall; one of these semantic dependencies points up the syntactic hierarchy, whereas the other points down it. Finally, the predicate to help in (d) takes the one argument Jim but is not directly connected to Jim