SIGSEM WG on the Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions

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Background

A great deal of attention has been devoted in the past ten years in the linguistic and computational linguistics communities to the syntax and the semantics of nouns, verbs and also, but to a lesser extent, to adjectives. Related phenomena such as quantification 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 probably the most polysemic category, possibly more so than adjectives, and linguistic realizations are extremely difficult to predict, not to mention the difficulty of identifying cross-linguistic regularities.

Let us mention, however, several projects devoted to prepositions expressing space, time and movement in AI and in NLP, and also the development of formalisms and heuristics to handle PP attachment ambiguities. Let us also mention the large number of studies in psycholinguistics and in ethnolinguistics around specific preposition senses. 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. An important and difficult question to address, is whether these notions are really primitive or can be decomposed and lexically analysed.

In argument structure, prepositions often play the crucial role of a mediator between the verb's expectations and the semantics of the nominal argument. The verb-preposition-noun semantic interactions are very subtle, but totally crucial for the development of an accurate semantics of the proposition. Let us note that a number of languages have postpositions or other markers like case instead of prepositions that play a quite similar role. Finally, languages like English have verbal compounds that integrate prepositions (compositionally or as collocations) while others, like Romance languages or Hindi either incorporate the preposition or include it in the prepositional phrase. All these configurations are semantically as well as syntactically of much interest.

Prepositions turn out to be a very useful category in a number of applications such as indexing and knowledge extraction since they introduce constructions of much interest like those dealing with instruments, means, comparisons, amounts, approximations, localizations, etc. They must necessarily be taken into account - and rendered accurately - for effective machine translation and lexical choice in language generation.

Prepositions are also closely related to semantic structures such as thematic roles, semantic templates or frames. From a linguistic perspective, several investigations have been carried out on quite diverse languages, emphasizing e.g., monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts or the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations. These observations cover in general a small group of closely related prepositions. The semantic characterization of prepositions has also motivated the emergence of a few dedicated logical frameworks and reasoning procedures.

Meetings

Organisation

The committee of the working group is composed of: Jacques Coulardeau (France), Betsy Klipple (USA), Valia Kordoni (Germany), Patrick Saint-Dizier (France, chair), Hidetosi Sirai (Japan), Aline Villavicencio (UK), and Joost Zwarts (The Netherlands).

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