Dogs know it, trees wait for it, and the wind snatches it: verbal collexemes and semantic domains of noun + verb personifications in Hungarian

Verbal constructions of personification (i.e. nonhuman subject + predicate verb primarily used for human beings only) can be considered a key linguistic realization of personification. Although as grammatical meta- phors they are rather invisible, the verb’s selection restrictions have a crucial role in expressing conceptual personification. In other words, the nominal form of personification as cross-domain mapping (e.g. WIND IS A THIEF) is often realized via verb + argument structures (e.g. the wind grabbed the papers out of my hand). In a previous study, the domains of MOVEMENT , CONTROL and MENTAL ACT proved to be the most frequent conceptual categories of verbal personifications in a corpus of 20th -century Hungarian poems. However, despite these initial findings, we have relatively little knowledge about what are the typical verbal components of personifi- cations in Hungarian on a more general level. The present paper aims to extend the scope of personification research, adopting corpus linguistic methodology to explore the semantic domains of verbal personification in Hungarian. In a collostructional analysis, I investigate the significant verbal collexemes of noun + verb personifications in the huTenTen12 corpus, using three categories of nominal keywords: animals (dog, horse, fish), plants (tree, fruit, flower) and inanimate natural phenomena (water, air, fire). The study hypothesises that verbs of MENTAL ACT will dominate the first category, MOVEMENT and CONTROL will be prominent among the verbal collexemes of nouns denoting personified natural phenomena, while the semantic domains of verbal personifications will be more hetero- geneous in the realm of plants

The Metaphorical Dimensions of VERB-TROUBLE Constructions in a Contrastive Perspective

In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden VERB-TROUBLE-Konstruktionen im Deutschen, Englischen, Ungarischen und Chinesischen kontrastiv untersucht. Diese Studie setzt sich zum Ziel, verschiedene metaphorische Muster darzustellen, die eine schwierige Situation zum Ausdruck bringen. Gleichzeitig liegt der Schwerpunkt auf dem zwischensprachlichen Vergleich der Konzeptualisierung von Handlungen oder Zuständen, die sich auf Schwierigkeiten beziehen. Um allgemeine Tendenzen im Hinblick auf die Präferenzen für bestimmte Metaphern nachweisen zu können, werden große einsprachige Korpora verwendet, die eine hohe Anzahl an Belegen aus der geschriebenen und der gesprochenen Sprache enthalten. Im qualitativen Teil meiner Untersuchung wird eine umfassende Analyse der idiomatischen und nicht-idiomatischen metaphorischen Ausdrücke durchgeführt, die auf authentischen Sprachdaten basiert. Mithilfe dieser Methoden habe ich neue Erkenntnisse bezüglich der inter- und intralingualen Vielfalt von VERB-TROUBLE-Konstruktionen gewonnen, wobei konzeptuelle Metaphern unterschiedlicher Komplexität verglichen wurden

Multiword expression processing: A survey

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a class of linguistic forms spanning conventional word boundaries that are both idiosyncratic and pervasive across different languages. The structure of linguistic processing that depends on the clear distinction between words and phrases has to be re-thought to accommodate MWEs. The issue of MWE handling is crucial for NLP applications, where it raises a number of challenges. The emergence of solutions in the absence of guiding principles motivates this survey, whose aim is not only to provide a focused review of MWE processing, but also to clarify the nature of interactions between MWE processing and downstream applications. We propose a conceptual framework within which challenges and research contributions can be positioned. It offers a shared understanding of what is meant by "MWE processing," distinguishing the subtasks of MWE discovery and identification. It also elucidates the interactions between MWE processing and two use cases: Parsing and machine translation. Many of the approaches in the literature can be differentiated according to how MWE processing is timed with respect to underlying use cases. We discuss how such orchestration choices affect the scope of MWE-aware systems. For each of the two MWE processing subtasks and for each of the two use cases, we conclude on open issues and research perspectives

Explaining Russian-German code-mixing

The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propose and test usage-based explanations of variation in mixing patterns in three morphosyntactic contexts: the adjective-modified noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and the plural marking of German noun insertions in bilingual sentences. In these contexts, German noun insertions combine with either Russian or German words and grammatical markers, thus yielding mixed bilingual and German monolingual constituents in otherwise Russian sentences, the latter also labelled as embedded-language islands. The results suggest that the frequency with which words are used together mediates the distribution of mixing patterns in each of the examined contexts. The differing impacts of co-occurrence frequency are attributed to the distributional and semantic specifics of the analyzed morphosyntactic configurations. Lexical frequency has been found to be another important determinant in this variation. Other factors include recency, or lexical priming, in discourse in the case of prepositional phrases, and phonological and structural similarities and differences in the inflectional systems of the contact languages in the case of plural marking

TCtract-A Collocation Extraction Approach for Noun Phrases Using Shallow Parsing Rules and Statistic Models

PACLIC 20 / Wuhan, China / 1-3 November, 200