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 in the syntactic hierarchy, which means that semantic dependency is entirely independent of the syntactic dependencies.
