this paper is an attempt to explore the prepositions used to encode the agent in persian passive constructions. according to givón (1983) the main function of the passive constructions is to defocus the agent. as the general trend in persian is to omit this defocused agent, we will stylistically divide the passive constructions into two main sub branches, namely unmarked and marked passives acc...

We describe an inventory of semantic relations that are expressed by prepositions. We define these relations by building on the word sense disambiguation task for prepositions and propose a mapping from preposition senses to the relation labels by collapsing semantically related senses across prepositions.

Machine translation of locative prepositions is not straightforward, even between closely related languages. This paper discusses a system of translation of locative prepositions between English and French. The system is based on the premises that English and French do not always conceptualize objects in the same way, and that this accounts for the major differences in the ways that locative pr...

Although direction plays an important role in the semantics of prepositions and verbs, there are not many precise and systematic treatments of this notion. This article offers a characterization and typology of directionality, based on two algebraic properties of spatial paths: cumulativity and reversability. This typology makes clear how directionality relates to the aspectual property of teli...

There are either morphological cases or cases asigned by word order and prepositions which determine function and semantic role of the arguments. We propose to lead parser by prepositional case to analize semifree order languages. In Spanish, word order and agreement will identify subject and inanimate direct object whereas prepositions will do the rest. Prepositions express grammatical relatio...

In this paper we present an experimental study on native speakers’ access to lexical relations among spatial relations. Our main focus is a still poorly understood domain: the lexical relations that hold between (pairs of) directional spatial prepositions (from, to) and locative prepositions (at). Two broad families of proposals exist in the literature. One family suggests that the members of t...

In this paper we present a Qualitative Spatial Reasoning formalism for the treatment of the polysemy of the prepositions “sobre” and “sob”. These prepositions are mainly used to express verticality in the Brazilian Portuguese. Through queries in grammars, we established 22 meanings for these prepositions and then we did a Corpus search to see how these prepositions are used in practice. We obta...

we will argue that the common practice in the literature of giving a long list of senses for spatial prepositions, implying that they are unrelated to one another is not adequate. the more adequate way is presenting a network of related senses based on a prototype. also, speaking specifically about persian preposition /d?r/, we will argue that the meanings of spatial prepositions arise as a con...