The tectogrammatical level is based on the dependency conception. The basic idea of the dependency conception is the fact that the use of the dependent element is determined by the use of the governing element, which stands for the entire combination (the governing part has its syntactic distribution identical to that of the entire combination of the governing and the dependent part). Dependency is reflected in the morphological form of the dependent elements (i.e. by agreement in morphological categories between the dependent and the governing part ot in the case of the dependent element). In accordance with some of the new syntactic approaches, the verb is considered the core of the sentence and the subject is taken to be dependent on the verb.
Representing dependency in tectogrammatical trees. A dependency relation between two elements in a tectogrammatical tree is primarily indicated by an edge between two nodes that goes from the node representing the governing element (governing node) to the node representing the dependent element (dependent node).
The tectogrammatical trees differ from a dependency tree as defined in the theory, in which each edge represents a dependency between two elements, and each dependency between two elements is represented by an edge, in the following:
representation of the second dependency with predicative complements, which is expressed by an attribute of the type reference (see Section 1.1, “Dual dependency”);
existence of non-dependency edges (see Section 1.2, “Non-dependency edges”),
cases of ambiguous dependency relations, in which an edge between two nodes does not reflect exact dependency relations in the sentence (see Section 1.3, “Ambiguous dependency”).