Semantics of Prepositional Constructs in Russian: Tentative Approach

~q The paper describes an experiment designed to investigate the semantic relationships between the three basic components of a prepositional construct: the governor, preposition and the complement. The data was derived from the Soviet Academy of Sciences Grammar and to some extent from the Soviet Academy of Sciences Dictionary. Following the classification provided by the above mentioned granm~r, the prepositional constructs were coded according to the granmmtical category of their governors and the type of relationship with their complement. The following governor categories were recognized: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, numeral. Next, the governors as well as the complements were coded according to their semantic properties from examples provided by the Granmmr. The semantic classification is arbitrary in that it does not attempt to map the universe of all Russian word forms in the five governor categories, but only tends to accomodate those complements and governors which occur in the examples and only if their characteristics are relevant. An attempt was made to keep the number of classes at minimum to permit easier recognition of possible patterns. Initial results are presented in tabular form. Grateful acknowledgement is made to Dr. M. Pacak for many helpful suggestions.