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 prepo...

In foreign language pedagogy, promoting learner’s insight means reducing the perceived arbitrariness of the foreign language system. The learner perceives something as arbitrary if he/she can see no reason why it should be as it is. For this reason, it is not enough to merely inform the learner that a particular element belongs to a given formal category and not to another. Rather, we need to e...

What these examples illustrate is that a particular Trajector (TR) can, in conjunction with a particular Landmark (LM), affect the interpretation of a preposition. On one hand, the interpretation ascribed to the sentence in (1) is that the LM, the bowl, contains or surrounds the TR, the fruit. On the other hand, in (2) the conventional interpretation is that the TR, the crack, constitutes a fla...

Prepositions are often considered to have too little semantic content or be too polysemous to warrant a proper semantic description. We illustrate the suitability of distributional similarity methods for analysing preposition semantics by way of an inter-preposition similarity task, and make the claim that any semantic account of preposition semantics must be partially conditioned on valence.

In the course of The Preposition Project, FrameNet sentences are used as instances to characteize preposition behavior. FrameNet sentences containing prepositional phrases beginning with a given preposition are presented to a lexicographer, whereupon the given preposition is tagged with a sense from a sense inventory derived from the Oxford Dictionary of English. For the 34 prepositions used in...