The Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions in the Task of Automatic Interpretation of Nominal Phrases and Compounds: A Cross-Linguistic Study

Abstract

In this article we explore the syntactic and semantic properties of prepositions in the context of the semantic interpretation of nominal phrases and compounds. We investigate the problem based on cross-linguistic evidence from a set of six languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Romanian. The focus on English and Romance languages is well motivated. Most of the time, English nominal phrases and compounds translate into constructions of the form N P N in Romance languages, where the P (preposition) may vary in ways that correlate with the semantics. Thus, we present empirical observations on the distribution of nominal phrases and compounds and the distribution of their meanings on two different corpora, based on two state-of-the-art classification tag sets: Lauer's set of eight prepositions and our list of 22 semantic relations. A mapping between the two tag sets is also provided. Furthermore, given a training set of English nominal phrases and compounds along with their translations in the five Romance languages, our algorithm automatically learns classification rules and applies them to unseen test instances for semantic interpretation. Experimental results are compared against two state-of-the-art models reported in the literature.

Prepositions in Applications: A Survey and Introduction to the Special Issue

“…For example, Levi would interpret truck driver as PATIENT, in the sense that truck is the patient of the underlying verb of the head noun to drive, whereas Lauer would interpret it as OF (c.f., driver of (the) truck). Girju (2007Girju ( , 2009 leveraged translation data to improve the accuracy of compound noun interpretation, based on the observation that the choice of preposition in Romance languages is often indicative of the semantics of the compound noun. Conversely, Johnston and Busa (1996) used Qualia structure from the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) to interpret the prepositions in Italian complex nominals, such as macchina da corsa "race car".…”

Student Writers’ Categories of Construals and Sense of the English Preposition on: A cognitive linguistics study

“…Second, prepositions need to be researched because they constitute a productive grammatical resource in English and in many other languages. According to Fang as cited in Girju, there is one preposition in ten English words in a corpus of one million words [5].…”

“…Coventry, Carmichael and Garrod investigated the semantics of spatial prepositions aiming to specify general factors of a functional geometry as also examined in Coventry and Garrod, Coventry and Olivier, and Coventry [6][7][8][9]. Another study was undertaken Girju which examines the syntax and semantics of prepositions in the context of the interpretation of nominal phrases and compounds based on cross-linguistic evidence from a set of six languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Romanian [5]. Meanwhile, Tahaineh conducted a crosssectional investigation on interlingual and intralingual errors of the use of English prepositions by Arab-Jordanian undergraduate students [10].…”

Preposition Stranding in Heritage Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

“…Although a semantic classification of prepositions lies beyond the scope of the present work (for a more detailed discussion on the Semantics of prepositions, see Girju, 2009), it is worthwhile to mention that they are highly polysemic words, that they can be assigned different semantic roles -agent, theme, experiencer, etc., -and that they can be assigned different semantic load: spatial, temporal, manner, purpose, etc.…”

“…A number of studies has shown that prepositions account for a seizable portion of the total number of words in different corpora of English and Spanish (Girju, 2009). …”