This paper presents a corpus-based method for automatic evaluation of geometric constraints on projective prepositions. The method is used to find an appropriate model of geometric constraints for a twodimensional domain. Two simple models are evaluated against the uses of projective prepositions in a corpus of natural language dialogues to find the best parameters of these models. Both models ...

Prepositions are hard to translate, because their meaning is often vague, and the choice of the correct preposition is often arbitrary. At the same time, making the correct choice is often critical to the coherence of the output text. In the context of statistical machine translation, this difficulty is enhanced due to the possible long distance between the preposition and the head it modifies,...

The ways in which different languages encode motion events has been the topic of intense analysis and dissection in recent years, especially with regard to Talmy’s (1991, 2000) verb/satellite-framed typology. This chapter shifts course by moving away from motion event typologies and the encoding of canonical motion events. Instead, it shows that English speakers can conceptualise space in terms...

The central claim of this thesis is that the combinatorial properties of words are determined by their lexical structures. I argue that the lexicalist position follows from the Word Grammar (WG) analytical framework. This framework, developed by Hudson (1984, 1990, 1994, 2003), is the one that I adopt in the linguistic descriptions in the thesis, and the further development of the framework is ...

farsi and english are both indo-european languages with similarities in their roots. as such, this experiment was conducted to understand which english accent (i.e. american, british or australian accents) would be easier for iranians to adapt. to answer this question, 30 medical students performed three different activities of (i) listening to audio texts in three accents, (ii) taking part in ...

The spatial prepositions ”in front of” or ”behind” can be used in different frames of reference; some determinants of their deictic and intrinsic uses are discussed. A series of experiments shows that both the intrinsic orientation of the reference object and the social characteristics of the situation significantly affect the production of utterances containing ”in front of” or ”behind”, or re...

This paper explicates how English and Polish select different aspects of a spatial situation to express coincidence or proximity. Spatial relations verbalized by different senses of at in English are reflected primarily by means of w, na, przy and u in Polish. First, at is presented as conceptualizing the relation of coincidence or proximity with the whole Landmark (LM) when it is conceived as ...

The SemEval-2007 task to disambiguate prepositions was designed as a lexical sample task. A set of over 25,000 instances was developed, covering 34 of the most frequent English prepositions, with two-thirds of the instances for training and one-third as the test set. Each instance identified a preposition to be tagged in a full sentence taken from the FrameNet corpus (mostly from the British Na...