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.

English allows a peculiar type of elliptical wh-questions that can be found only under sluicing, in which the wh-object of the preposition appears not after the preposition but before it, as in “John fixed it, but I don’t remember what with.” Merchant (2002) calls this construction Swiping. This study evaluates two competing syntactic analyses of Swiping, by using data from a novel source: the ...

Corpora from the Pattern Dictionary of English Prepositions (PDEP) provide the basis for examining the behavior of 304 English prepositions, with 1040 senses (patterns) describing in 20 fields. The PDEP corpora comprise dependency parses for 81,509 sentences in CoNLL-X format, previously used in several studies, particularly used for disambiguation modeling. We have now put these parse data int...

We address the task of automatically correcting preposition errors in learners’ Dutch by modelling preposition usage in native language. Specifically, we build two models exploiting a large corpus of Dutch. The first is a binary model for detecting whether a preposition should be used at all in a given position or not. The second is a multiclass model for selecting the appropriate preposition i...

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...

Prepositions are often considered to have too little semantic content or be too polysemous to warrant a proper semantic description. We first 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 vale...

In this paper, we consider the problem of generating candidate corrections for the task of correcting errors in text. We focus on the task of correcting errors in preposition usage made by non-native English speakers, using discriminative classifiers. The standard approach to the problem assumes that the set of candidate corrections for a preposition consists of all preposition choices particip...

This paper presents the current results of an ongoing research project on corpus distribution of prepositions and pronouns within Polish preposition-pronoun contractions. The goal of the project is to provide a quantitative description of Polish preposition-pronoun contractions taking into consideration morphosyntactic properties of their components. It is expected that the results will provide...

This paper is concerned with the task of preposition generation in the context of a grammar checker. Relevant features for this task can range from lexical features, such as words and their part-ofspeech tags in the vicinity of the preposition, to syntactic features that take into account the attachment site of the prepositional phrase (PP), as well as its argument/adjunct distinction. We compa...