Verb-particles: particle placement in passives

Verb-Particle Constructions in Questions

In this paper, we investigate the behavior of verb-particle constructions in English questions. We present a small dataset that contains questions and verb-particle construction candidates. We demonstrate that there are significant differences in the distribution of WH-words, verbs and prepositions/particles in sentences that contain VPCs and sentences that contain only verb + prepositional phr...

Compositionality in Verb-Particle Constructions

We are developing a broad-coverage deep semantic lexicon for a system that parses sentences into a logical form expressed in a rich ontology that supports reasoning. In this paper we look at verb-particle constructions (VPCs), and the extent to which they can be treated compositionally vs idiomatically. First we distinguish between the different types of VPCs based on their compositionality and...

Particle Placement in English

Classifying Particle Semantics In English Verb-Particle Constructions

Previous computational work on learning the semantic properties of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) has focused on their compositionality, and has left unaddressed the issue of which meaning of the component words is being used in a given VPC. We develop a feature space for use in classification of the sense contributed by the particle in a VPC, and test this on VPCs using the particle up. Th...

Pseudo-Passives as Adjectival Passives

The pseudo-passive is peculiar in that (i) the DP that appears to be the complement of a preposition undergoes passivization, and (ii) it is semantically characterized by the fact that it describes a resultant state or a characteristic of the Theme. The first peculiarity can be explained if the DP is not the complement of P but the complement of the V-P complex. However, the problem with this a...