The annotation of preposition senses in German

It seems to be common wisdom that prepositions (especially simple prepositions) are highly polysemous. Preposition senses seem to be well explored, as there exists plenty of literature on prepositions and their interpretations. On a closer inspection, however, it turns out that we are far away from a well-structured understanding of preposition senses. There is mutual consent about simple preposition being derived from adverbs and retaining the basic meanings of those adverbs, like a temporal, spatial or modal usage. Thus, most simple prepositions in German have spatial interpretations, from which metaphorical usages have been derived1. Temporal interpretations are also common with the majority of simple prepositions, whereas other interpretations (as e.g. EXISTENCE – cf. chapter 5) are represented to a lesser extent. Precisely those senses are the ones being poorly understood and studied to a lesser extent. But even for the well examined ones, there is the need for a representational pattern suitable not only for a few but for all prepositions at best. This demand gains particular importance if one tries to determine the distribution of preposition senses in large corpora. An annotation scheme is required in the first place to automatically classify senses or to determine the distribution of contextual patterns of preposition senses in annotated corpora.