Ontology-Based Semantics for Prepositions

This paper addresses the elaboration of a relation-logical compositional semantics for the meaning content of nominals using formal ontologies as semantic domains. Prepositions are conceived as denoting binary semantic role relations between concepts in the ontology. The ontology comes with ontological affinities specifying the admissible ontological combinations. The key idea is to establish a many-many relation between lexical items and nodes in an ontology. This mapping is then systematically extended to phrases, appealing to a relational compositionality principle. The paper focuses on the semantics of prepositions and prepositional phrases, examining in particular disambiguation of nominal phrases containing multiple embedded prepositional phrases, utilizing the ontological affinities. Danish, which offers a rich system of prepositions, is used in the example material.