Multiword expressions

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar

PROPER WORDS TO COMMON WORDS CONVERSION: THE FAMOUS, THE INFAMOUS AND THE GROWTH OF INFORMAL LEXICON

This paper seeks to describe the conversion (one of word formation processes) from proper words to common words in Indonesian. By the time this paper was written, JONRU ‘to lie’ and TEDJO ‘to be reckless’ were quote infamous: the frequency of occurrence was quite productive especially in social media. In terms of the morphological forms, the word formation follows the affix formation in Indonesian. The semantic features of these words refer to the negative prosodies that these words carry, which seem to root from how people assess their quality. I argue that the conversion is aimed at performing evaluation on personal quality regardless of its morphological forms. The trigger of this phenomenon seems to be the events where mass media mostly pay attention to; and this is commonly negative in meaning. Consider also di-munirkan ‘to be assasinated’ and di-gusdurkan ‘to be impeached’ where MUNIR (a human right activist) was assassinated and GUSDUR (4 th Indonesian President) was impeached. There are some other cases when they do not specifically relate to the evaluation but using the person’s fame to make it widely used such as SUDOMO, which is an acronym of Susu Doi Montok (sexy breasts). However, it is important to realize that the objects of the research in this paper 1) are not used in formal situation 2) are productive in a short span of time and 3) are understood in condition that the knowledge is shared among speakers

The polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir: a behavioral profile analysis

This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir (‘feel’) which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver (‘see’) and mirar (‘look’), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished – i.e. which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses (sentirse) and the other uses (sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

A French Fairy Tale Corpus syntactically and semantically annotated.

International audienceFairy tales, folktales and more generally children stories have lately attracted the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. As such, very few corpora exist and linguistic resources are lacking. The work presented in this paper aims at filling this gap by presenting a syntactically and semantically annotated corpus. It focuses on the linguistic analysis of a Fairy Tales Corpus, and provides the description of the syntactic and semantic resources developed for Information Extraction. Resources include syntactic dependency relation annotation for 120 verbs; referential annotation, which is concerned with annotating each anaphoric occurrence and Proper Name with the most specific noun in the text; ontology matching for a substantial part of the nouns in the corpus; semantic role labelling for 41 verbs using the FrameNet database. The article also sums up previous analyses of this corpus and indicates possible uses of this corpus for the NLP community