Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions

Saint-Dizier, Patrick

ISBN 10: 1402038992 / ISBN 13: 9781402038990

Published by Springer 2007-01, 2007

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-IUK-9781402038990

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions
• Publisher: Springer 2007-01
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1402038992
• ISBN 13: 9781402038990
• Binding: PF
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A great deal of attention has been devoted in the past ten years in the lingu- tic and computational linguistics communities to the syntax and the semantics of nouns, verbs and also, but to a lesser extent, to adjectives. Related p- nomena such as quanti?cation or tense and aspect have motivated a number of in-depth studies and projects. In contrast, prepositions have received less attention. The reasons are quite clear: prepositions are highly polysemic, p- sibly more so than adjectives, and linguistic realizations are extremely dif?cult to predict, not to mention the dif?culty of identifying cross-linguistic regula- ties. Furthermore, a number of languages do not use prepositions or postpo- tions (or make a limited use of them) and prefer other linguistic forms such as morphological marks, e. g. case marks. Let us mention, however, projects devoted to prepositions expressing space, time and movement in arti?cial intelligence and in natural language processing, and also the development of formalisms and heuristics to handle prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. Prepositions are also present in subcategorization frames of predicative lexical items, but often in an informal and coarse-grained way. Let us also mention the large number of studies in psycholinguistics and in ethnolinguistics around speci?c preposition senses. Finally, prepositions seem to reach a very deep level in the cognitive-semantic structure of the brain: cognitive grammar developers often use prepositions in their metalanguage, in order to express very primitive notions.

From the Back Cover

This book is the first to provide an integrated view of preposition from morphology to reasoning, via syntax and semantics. It offers new insights in applied and formal linguistics, and cognitive science. It underlines the importance of prepositions in a number of computational linguistics applications, such as information retrieval and machine translation. The reader will benefit from a wide range of views and applications to various linguistic frameworks, among which, most notably, HPSG. The book is for researchers working in the fields of computational linguistics, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.