Prepositions and Their Syntactic Use in Albanian and English

Abstract

A preposition is a word or set of words that indicates location or some other relationship between a noun or pronoun and other parts of the sentence. It refers to the word or phrase which shows the relationship between one thing and another, linking nouns, pronouns and phrases to other words in a sentence. They are abstract words that have no concrete meaning. They merely show the relationships between groups of words. Within a preposition, there are many different variations in meaning that are conveyed. The proper interpretation of prepositions is an important issue for automatic natural language understanding. Although the complexity of preposition usage has been argued for and documented by various scholars in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics, very few studies have been done on the function of prepositions in natural language processing (NLP) applications. The reason is that prepositions are probably the most polysemous category and thus, their linguistic realizations are difficult to predict and their cross-linguistic regularities difficult to identify. Prepositions play a major role in the syntactic structures of the English language and they often make an essential contribution to sentence meaning by signifying temporal and spatial relationships, as well as abstract relations involving cause and purpose, agent and instrument, manner and accompaniment, support and much more. They are sensitive linguistic elements that are culturally acceptable and very well known to all members of the same linguistic community. According to cognitive semantics, the figurative senses of a preposition are extended from its spatial senses through conceptual metaphors. In a pedagogical context, it may be useful to draw learners' attention to those aspects of a preposition's spatial sense that are especially relevant for its metaphorization processes. Prepositions have type restrictions on their arguments, they assign thematic roles, and they have a semantic content, possibly underspecified. The only difference with the other open-class categories like nouns, verbs or adjectives is that they do not have any morphology.