This paper offers a unified approach to Italian spatial prepositions, such as di fronte a ‘in front of’, verso ‘towards’, in ‘in’, dietro a ‘behind’, and nel mezzo di ‘in the middle of’. Three assumptions play a key role. First, Italian spatial prepositions can differ sensibly in their morphological structure, but share the same syntactic properties. Second, their sentential distribution is in ...

In this paper, I draw on data from Russian to argue for an asymmetry between Goal and Source prepositional phrases. Source prepositional phrases are structurally ambiguous; they can occur both as arguments and adjuncts in certain syntactic contexts. Goal prepositional phrases are unambiguously arguments. I claim that Source prepositions have lexically specified semantics, which determines their...

This paper present the treatment of prepositions and conjunctionsinnatural languageinterfacestodatabases(NLIDB)thatallowsbetter translation of queries expressed in natural language into formal languages. Prepositions and conjunctionsweren’t sufficiently studied for their usage in NLIDBs,becausemostoftheNLIDBsjust lookforkeywordsinthesentences and focus their analysis on nouns and verbs getting ...

We present results from a series of experiments, where relevant factors for the use of path prepositions were examined. We were especially interested in the concepts behind the German prepositions “entlang” and “vorbei” (similar to “along” and “past”). After exploring the basic properties human beings attribute to these prepositions, we systematically varied those properties to investigate thei...

The correct attachment of prepositional phrases (PPs) is a central disambiguation problem when parsing natural languages. This paper compares the baseline situation for French as exemplified in the Le Monde treebank with earlier findings for English, German and Swedish. We perform uniform treebank queries and show that the noun attachment rate for French prepositions is strongly influenced by t...

NLP systems, in order to be robust, must handle novel and i l l formed input . One common type of error involves the use of non-s tandard preposit ions to mark arguments . In this paper, we argue that such errors can be handled in a systematic fashion, and that a system designed to handle them offers other advantages. We o f f e r a c lass i f i ca t ion scheme for preposi t ion usage errors. F...

In Härtl (2003)), it was shown that congruous pictures were size categorized – i.e. a conceptual task – slower than incongruous ones subsequent to a localization expression containing a prepositional phrase (as in to stick s.th. on the ...). No such difference showed up with the intransitive prepositional variants, i.e. particles as in to stick s.th. on. In the current study, transitive activit...