The variability of multi-word verbal expressions in Estonian

Abstract

This article focuses on the variability of one of the subtypes of multiword expressions, namely those consisting of a verb and a particle or a verb and its complement(s). We build on evidence from Estonian, an agglutinative language with free word order, analysing the behaviour of verbal multi-word expressions (opaque and transparent idioms, support verb constructions and particle verbs). Using this data we analyse such phenomena as the order of the components of a multi-word expression, lexical substitution and morphosyntactic flexibility.

Learning to detect english and hungarian light verb constructions

“…An Estonian database and a corpus of multiword verbs was constructed [Kaalep and Muischnek 2006, Muischnek and Kaalep 2010), and Krenn [2008] developed a database of German PP-verb combinations. The Prague Dependency Treebank was also annotated for multiword expressions [Bejcek and Stranák 2010], thus for LVCs, too [Cinková and Kolářová 2005].…”

“…házkutatást tart (search.of.premises-ACC hold) 'to conduct search of premises' in Hungarian). Third, there are languages that abound in verb + noun constructions or multiword verbs (such as Estonian (Muischnek and Kaalep, 2010) or Persian (Mansoory and Bijankhan, 2008)): verbal concepts are mostly expressed by combining a noun with a light verb (Mansoory and Bijankhan, 2008).…”

Semi-Compositional Noun+Verb Constructions: Theoretical Questions and Computational Linguistic Analyses

“…Third, there are languages that abound in verb + noun constructions or multiword verbs (Hindi (Sinha, 2009;Sinha, 2011), Bengali , Estonian (Kaalep and Muischnek, 2006;Kaalep and Muischnek, 2008;Muischnek and Kaalep, 2010), Persian (Mansoory and Bijankhan, 2008)): verbal concepts are mostly expressed by combining a noun with a light verb (Mansoory and Bijankhan, 2008).…”

“…A 1000-sentence database from the British National Corpus contains 345 noun compounds (Nicholson and Baldwin, 2008). Kaalep and Muischnek (2006; describe an Estonian database and a corpus of multiword verbs (see also Muischnek and Kaalep (2010)) and Krenn (2008) developed a database of German PP-verb combinations. The Prague Dependency Treebank is also annotated for multiword expressions (Bejcek and Stranák, 2010), thus for semi-compositional constructions too (Cinková and Kolářová, 2005).…”

Detecting Multiword Expressions and Named Entities in Natural Language Texts

“…An Estonian database and a corpus of multiword verbs were constructed (Kaalep and Muischnek, 2006;Kaalep and Muischnek, 2008;Muischnek and Kaalep, 2010)) and Krenn (2008) developed a database of German PP-verb combinations. The Prague Dependency Treebank was also annotated for multiword expressions (Bejcek and Stranák, 2010) and light verb constructions (Cinková and Kolářová, 2005).…”