Selected Types of Pg-Ambiguity

The objective of the present paper is to analyse syntactic ambiguity of prepositional groups (Pg’s) within the background of dependency oriented Functional Generative Description (FGD). Several basic types of Pg-ambiguity are presented and the possibilities of searching for their occurrences in the Prague Dependency Tree Bank (PDT) is illustrated. Criteria for automatic Pg-ambiguity detection are proposed based on 1. word order patterns, 2. valency frames of verbs, nouns and adjectives (including verbonominal collocations), 3. formal criteria concerning separation principles, and 4. semantic features; the usefulness of these criteria is discussed.