Subcategorization of Adverbial Meanings Based on Corpus Data

Abstract

Abstract:We introduce a corpus based description of selected adverbial meanings in Czech sentences. Its basic repertory is one of a long lasting tradition in both scientific and school grammars. However, before the corpus era, researchers had to rely on their own excerption; but nowadays, current syntax has a vast material basis in the form of electronic corpora available. On the case of spatial adverbials, we describe our methodology which we used to acquire a detailed, comprehensive, well-arranged description of meanings of adverbials including a list of formal realizations with examples. Theoretical knowledge stemming from this work will lead into an improval of the annotation of the meanings in the Prague Dependency Treebanks which serve as the corpus sources for our research. The Prague Dependency Treebanks include data manually annotated on the layer of deep syntax and thus provide a large amount of valuable examples on the basis of which the meanings of adverbials can be defined more accurately and subcategorized more precisely. Both theoretical and practical results will subsequently be used in NLP, such as machine translation.

Search for the Relation of Form and Function Using the ForFun Database

“…In addition to valuable statistical data, the ForFun database provides an extremely rich material for detailed linguistic studies of individual language phenomena and for their description and classification, e.g., valency behavior, coordination/discourse relations, idioms and complex predicates, comparison of written and spoken texts, etc. The first linguistic studies based on the database analyze and subclassify the functors denoting space and time (Mikulová et al, 2017a. The studies perform a detailed description of subtle meanings of temporal and spatial adjuncts including a list of formal means with real examples coming from both written and spoken texts and as such demonstrate that ForFun can be used for fundamental linguistic research.…”