Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions

ISBN-13: 9781402038990 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 332 str.

Opis

A great deal of attention has been devoted in the past ten years in the lingu- tic and computational linguistics communities to the syntax and the semantics of nouns, verbs and also, but to a lesser extent, to adjectives. Related p- nomena such as quanti?cation or tense and aspect have motivated a number of in-depth studies and projects. In contrast, prepositions have received less attention. The reasons are quite clear: prepositions are highly polysemic, p- sibly more so than adjectives, and linguistic realizations are extremely dif?cult to predict, not to mention the dif?culty of identifying cross-linguistic regula- ties. Furthermore, a number of languages do not use prepositions or postpo- tions (or make a limited use of them) and prefer other linguistic forms such as morphological marks, e. g. case marks. Let us mention, however, projects devoted to prepositions expressing space, time and movement in arti?cial intelligence and in natural language processing, and also the development of formalisms and heuristics to handle prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. Prepositions are also present in subcategorization frames of predicative lexical items, but often in an informal and coarse-grained way. Let us also mention the large number of studies in psycholinguistics and in ethnolinguistics around speci?c preposition senses. Finally, prepositions seem to reach a very deep level in the cognitive-semantic structure of the brain: cognitive grammar developers often use prepositions in their metalanguage, in order to express very primitive notions.

Spis treści

Preface.- Acknowledgments.- Introduction to the Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions; Patrick Saint-Dizier.- Prepostion Contractions in Quebec French; Luc V. Baronian.- The A’s and BE’s of English Prepositions; Andrew McMichael.- Typological Tendencies and Universal Grammar in the Acquisition of Adpositions; David Stringer.- Multilingual inventory of interpretations for postpositions and prepositions; Mikel Lersundi and Eneko Agirre.- German prepositions and their kin; Martin Volk.- Directionality Selection; Marcus Kracht.- Verb-Particle Constructions in the World Wide Web; Aline Villavicencio.- Prepositional Arguments in a Multilingual Context; Valia Kordoni.- The syntax of French à and de: an HPSG analysis; Anne Abeille, Olvier Bonami, Danièle Godard, Jesse Tseng.- In Search of a Systematic Treatment of Determinerless PPs, Timothy Baldwin, John Beavers, Leonoor van der Beek, Francis Bond, Dan Flickinger and Ivan A. Sag.- Combinatorial Aspects of Collocational Prepositional Phrases; Beata Trawi´nski and Manfred Sailer and Jan-Philipp Soehn.- Distributional Similarity andPreposition Semantics; Timothy Baldwin.- A Computational Model of the Referential Semantics of Projective Prepositions; John Kelleher and Josef van Genabith.- Ontology-Based Semantics for Prepositions; Per Anker Jensen and Jörgen Fischer Nilsson.- Analysis and Interpretation of the Japanese Postposition No; Ryusuke Kikuchi and Hidetosi Sirai.- What do the notions of instrumentality and of manner have in common?; Alda Mari.- A Conceptual Semantics for Prepositions denoting Instrumentality; Alda Mari, Patrick Saint-Dizier.- Prepositions in Cooperative Question-Answering Systems:a Preliminary Analysis; Farah Benamara and Véronique Moriceau.- Index.

Blurb

This book is the first to provide an integrated view of preposition from morphology to reasoning, via syntax and semantics. It offers new insights in applied and formal linguistics, and cognitive science. It underlines the importance of prepositions in a number of computational linguistics applications, such as information retrieval and machine translation. The reader will benefit from a wide range of views and applications to various linguistic frameworks, among which, most notably, HPSG. The book is for researchers working in the fields of computational linguistics, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.