Double Trouble: The Problem of Construal in Semantic Annotation of Adpositions

We consider the semantics of prepositions, revisiting a broad-coverage annotation scheme used for annotating all 4,250 preposition tokens in a 55,000 word corpus of English. Attempts to apply the scheme to adpositions and case markers in other languages, as well as some problematic cases in English, have led us to reconsider the assumption that an adposition’s lexical contribution is equivalent to the role/relation that it mediates. Our proposal is to embrace the potential for construal in adposition use, expressing such phenomena directly at the token level to manage complexity and avoid sense proliferation. We suggest a framework to represent both the scene role and the adposition’s lexical function so they can be annotated at scale—supporting automatic, statistical processing of domain-general language—and discuss how this representation would allow for a simpler inventory of labels.

[1]  Ken Litkowski,et al.  The Preposition Project , 2021, ArXiv.

[2]  C. Fillmore,et al.  Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What's X doing Y? construction , 1999 .

[3]  Seungjin Choi,et al.  Shaping meanings for language: universal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semanti , 2001 .

[4]  Philip Resnik,et al.  More than Words: Syntactic Packaging and Implicit Sentiment , 2009, NAACL.

[5]  Rafael E. Núñez,et al.  With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time , 2006, Cogn. Sci..

[6]  Andrea Tyler,et al.  Reconsidering Prepositional Polysemy Networks: The Case of Over , 2001 .

[7]  René Dirven.  Emotions as cause and the cause of emotions , 1997 .

[8]  Neville Ryant,et al.  A large-scale classification of English verbs , 2008, Lang. Resour. Evaluation.

[9]  A. Goldberg.  Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language , 2006 .

[10]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Metaphors We Live by , 1982 .

[11]  Martin Haspelmath,et al.  The geometry of grammatical meaning: Semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison , 2003 .

[12]  Gisa Rauh.  On the grammar of lexical and non-lexical prepositions in English , 1993 .

[13]  Meredith Osmond.  The prepositions we use in the construal of emotions: Why do we sayfed up withbysick and tired of? , 1997 .

[14]  Davide Picca,et al.  Supersense Tagger for Italian , 2008, LREC.

[15]  Kemal Oflazer,et al.  Coarse Lexical Semantic Annotation with Supersenses: An Arabic Case Study , 2012, ACL.

[16]  R. Berman,et al.  Dative Marking of the Affectee Role: Data from Modern Hebrew , 1982 .

[17]  Harry Bunt,et al.  A Hierarchical Unification of LIRICS and VerbNet Semantic Roles , 2011, 2011 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Semantic Computing.

[18]  C. Fillmore,et al.  Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone , 1988 .

[19]  L. Boroditsky,et al.  Time in the mind: Using space to think about time , 2008, Cognition.

[20]  Leonard Talmy,et al.  Fictive Motion in Language and ‘Ception’ , 2018 .

[21]  Collin F. Baker,et al.  A Frames Approach to Semantic Analysis , 2009 .

[22]  Dan Roth,et al.  An Inventory of Preposition Relations , 2013, ArXiv.

[23]  Seth Lindstromberg,et al.  English Prepositions Explained , 1998 .

[24]  R. Dirven,et al.  Dividing up physical and mental space into conceptual categories by means of English prepositions , 1993 .

[25]  Robert B. Dewell,et al.  Over again: Image-schema transformations in semantic analysis , 1994 .

[26]  Dirk Hovy,et al.  Disambiguation of Preposition Sense Using Linguistically Motivated Features , 2009, NAACL.

[27]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind , 1988 .

[28]  Jena D. Hwang.  Making Verb Argument Adjunct Distinctions in English , 2012 .

[29]  Vyvyan Evans,et al.  The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning, and Cognition , 2003 .

[30]  G. Lakoff.  Women, fire, and dangerous things : what categories reveal about the mind , 1989 .

[31]  Annette Herskovits.  Language and Spatial Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Prepositions in English , 2009 .

[32]  Nathan Schneider,et al.  A Corpus of Preposition Supersenses , 2016, LAW@ACL.

[33]  Claudia Brugman.  The Story of over : polysemy, semantics, and the structure of the lexicon , 1988 .

[34]  J. Toomasian.  The Case for the Case , 2016, Perfusion.

[35]  H. Verkuyl,et al.  Time and space in conceptual and logical semantics: the notion of Path , 1992 .

[36]  Hwee Tou Ng,et al.  Joint Learning of Preposition Senses and Semantic Roles of Prepositional Phrases , 2009, EMNLP.

[37]  R. Langacker.  Conceptualization, Symbolization, and Grammar , 2014 .

[38]  Bernhard Wälchli,et al.  Similarity semantics and building probabilistic semantic maps from parallel texts , 2010 .

[39]  Yasemin Altun,et al.  Broad-Coverage Sense Disambiguation and Information Extraction with a Supersense Sequence Tagger , 2006, EMNLP.

[40]  Timothy Baldwin,et al.  MELB-YB: Preposition Sense Disambiguation Using Rich Semantic Features , 2007, Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2007).

[41]  Daniel Gildea,et al.  The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles , 2005, CL.

[42]  R. Jackendoff.  Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution , 2002 .

[43]  Dan Roth,et al.  Modeling Semantic Relations Expressed by Prepositions , 2013, TACL.

[44]  Günter Radden.  The conceptualisation of emotional causality by means of prepositional phrases , 1998 .

[45]  Nathan Schneider,et al.  A Hierarchy with, of, and for Preposition Supersenses , 2015, LAW@NAACL-HLT.