Semantic interpretations of postpositions and prepositions: a multilingual inventory for Basque, English and Spanish

This article describes a common inventory of interpretations for postpositions (Basque) and prepositions (English and Spanish). The inventory is a flat list of tags, based mainly on thematic roles. Using the same inventory allows to know for each postposition or preposition, which are the translations for each possible interpretation. We think this resource will be useful for studies on machine translation, but also on lexical acquisition experiments on the syntax-semantic interface that make use of multilingual data. The method to derive the inventory and the list of interpretations for Basque postpositions and Spanish and English prepositions has tried to be systematic, and is based on [Aldezabal, forthcoming and [Dorr, 1993].