This is the first in a pair of papers that aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of the semantic phenomenon of distributivity in natural language. This paper investigates and formalizes different sources of covert distributivity. Apart from lexical distributivity effects, which are modeled by meaning postulates, phrasal distributivity is captured via two covert operators: (i) a D operator dis...

This work describes an experimental evaluation of the significance of phrasal verb treatment for obtaining better quality statistical machine translation (SMT) results. Phrasal verbs are multiword expressions used frequently in English, independent of the domain and degree of formality of language. They are challenging for natural language processing due to their idiosyncratic semantic and synt...

We introduce a new type of transduction grammar that allows for learning of probabilistic phrasal bilexica, leading to a significant improvement in spoken language translation accuracy. The current state-of-the-art in statistical machine translation relies on a complicated and crude pipeline to learn probabilistic phrasal bilexica—the very core of any speech translation system. In this paper, w...

This paper presents an optimality theoretic approach to the transitive particle verb construction (PVC), also referred to in the literature e.g. as phrasal verbs or separable complex verbs. This construction occurs in most if not all of the Germanic languages and has been studied most intensely and controversially in the generative literature (cf. Dehé et al 2002 and Dehé 2002 for recent analys...

The journal editors and the Department of English Studies at the Universitat Jaume I wish to pay tribute to our colleague, friend and teacher, Dr. Xavier Campos Vilanova who passed away earlier this year. Xavier showed a passionate enthusiasm for the study of the history of the English language and literature, but also for everything he did. From taking photographs, researching on the meaning o...

In this paper we propose a framework of Informationbased Case Grammar (ICG). This grammatical formalism entails that the lexical entry for each word contain both semantic and syntactic feature structures. In the feature structure of a phrasal head, we encode syntactic and semantic constraints on grammatical phrasal patterns in terms of thematic structures, and encode the precedence relations in...