Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions

1. Front Matter

   Pages 1-14

   PDF

2. Introduction to the Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions

   • Patrick Saint-Dizier

   Pages 1-25

3. Preposition Contractions in Quebec French

   • Luc V. Baronian

   Pages 27-42

4. The A’s and BE’s of English Prepositions

   • Andrew McMichael

   Pages 43-56

5. Typological Tendencies and Universal Grammar in the Acquisition of Adpositions

   • David Stringer

   Pages 57-68

6. Multilingual inventory interpretations for postpositions and prepositions

   • Mikel Lersundi, Eneko Agirre

   Pages 69-82

7. German prepositions and their kin

   • Martin Volk

   Pages 83-99

8. Directionality Selection

   • Marcus Kracht

   Pages 101-114

9. Verb-Particle Constructions in the World Wide Web

   • Aline Villavicencio

   Pages 115-130

10. Prepositional Arguments in a Multilingual Context

    • Valia Kordoni

    Pages 131-145

11. The syntax of French à and de: an HPSG analysis

    • Anne Abeillé, Olivier Bonami, Danièle Godard, Jesse Tseng

    Pages 147-162

12. In Search of a Systematic Treatment of Determinerless PPs

    • Timothy Baldwin, John Beavers, Leonoor van der Beek, Francis Bond, Dan Flickinger, Ivan A. Sag

    Pages 163-179

13. Combinatorial Aspects of Collocational Prepositional Phrases

    • Beata Trawiński, Manfred Sailer, Jan-Philipp Soehn

    Pages 181-196

14. Distributional Similarity and Preposition Semantics

    • Timothy Baldwin

    Pages 197-210

15. A Computational Model of the Referential Semantics of Projective Prepositions

    • John Kelleher, Josef van Genabith

    Pages 211-228

16. Ontology-Based Semantics for Prepositions

    • Per Anker Jensen, Jörgen Fischer Nilsson

    Pages 229-244

17. Analysis and Interpretation of the Japanese Postposition no

    • Ryusuke Kikuchi, Hidetosi Sirai

    Pages 245-261

18. What do the notions of instrumentality and of manner have in common?

    • Alda Mari

    Pages 263-287

19. A Conceptual Semantics for Prepositions denoting Instrumentality

    • Alda Mari, Patrick Saint-Dizier

    Pages 289-305

20. Prepositions in Cooperative Question-Answering Systems: a Preliminary Analysis

    • Farah Benamara, Véronique Moriceau

    Pages 307-330

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.

• Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar
• Index
• Syntax
• computational linguistics
• grammar
• linguistics
• morphology
• preposition
• prepositional phrase
• semantics

• CNRS, Toulouse, France

  Patrick Saint-Dizier

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