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The driving forces behind variation in the dative construction have stood as a puzzle both from t... more The driving forces behind variation in the dative construction have stood as a puzzle both from the point of view of child language acquisition and in the theoretical syntactic literature addressing adult production. One line of thought attributes these choices to lexical meaning differences among dative verbs ((Gropen et al., 1989) for children; for adults) or to constructional differences in meaning that constrain verb choice . But studies of actual usage are increasingly showing that the mapping between meanings and construction choice is much more flexible than these earlier studies allowed . Additionally, usage studies point to the important role of properties such as end weight and pronominality in determining construction choice for adults .

Case is the result of a grammaticalization process in which frequently used words develop more ge... more Case is the result of a grammaticalization process in which frequently used words develop more general meanings and more economical forms. Since general meanings apply more often and economical forms are preferably used, frequency works as a flywheel. As will be shown in Chapter 2, case expresses the most general and most frequently used meanings, viz. semantic roles. Semantic roles are generalizations about event participants necessary for communication. The semantics of an event participant in a particular event is much richer but cannot efficiently be communicated as such for all individual participants. By categorizing arguments into semantic roles, the speaker can use more economical means of expression, namely the forms corresponding to semantic roles. Using the semantics of the predicate, the hearer can unpack this information again. For example, the Agent of to hit is a ‘hitter’ and the Agent of to walk is a ‘walker’. Structural case can be seen as a high-level generalizatio...

Language Typology and Universals, 2011

This paper discusses a cross-linguistic sample of spatial PPs in languages that both have adposit... more This paper discusses a cross-linguistic sample of spatial PPs in languages that both have adpositions and case. It is shown that the distribution of labor within these potentially complex PPs follows from two general principles only. According to the principle of Grammaticalization, less frequent meaning elements should never be expressed by more grammatical means than more frequent ones. According to the principle of Compositionality, the syntactic construction should reflect the order of semantic function application. The only viable spatial PP constructions according to these principles are those constructions in which the P simultaneously expresses configuration and directionality, and constructions in which the P expresses configuration and the case marker on the P directionality.

Linguistics in the Netherlands, 2008

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

ABSTRACT Path and manner of movement are generally taken to be the core distinguishing features i... more ABSTRACT Path and manner of movement are generally taken to be the core distinguishing features in descriptions of motion events. It is proposed here that this two-dimensional characterization of the lexical semantics of motion verbs needs to be reconsidered. We introduce a new research method, the cross-linguistic dictionary-lookup analysis, by means of which additional meaning dimensions can be identified for motion verbs in Dutch, English and German.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the linguistic ontology of mode (also known as directionality). It ... more ABSTRACT This paper discusses the linguistic ontology of mode (also known as directionality). It is argued that mode is best analyzed in terms of temporally linked locations and that our understanding of a corresponding path of motion probably follows from the conceptual enrichment of the semantics of a motion expression.

Proceedings of the Third ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions - Prepositions '06, 2006

This meeting is supported by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (SIGSEM, http://mcs. ope... more This meeting is supported by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (SIGSEM, http://mcs. open.ac.uk/pp2464/sigsem/), which aims to promote research in all aspects of computational semantics. Two successful workshops endorsed by ACL-SIGSEM devoted to the topic of prepositions were held in Toulouse, France in September 2003, and Colchester, UK in April 2005. Prepositions have received a considerable amount of attention in recent years, due to their importance in computational tasks. For instance, in NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have attracted a lot of attention, and different machine learning techniques have been employed with varying degrees of success. Researchers from various perspectives have also looked at spatial or temporal aspects of prepositions, and their cross-linguistic differences, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts or the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations. Moreover, in languages like English and German, phrasal verbs have also been the subject of considerable effort, ranging from techniques for their automatic extraction from corpora, to methods for the determination of their semantics. In other languages, like Romance languages or Hindi, the focus has been either on the incorporation of the preposition or its inclusion in the prepositional phrase. All these configurations are of much interest semantically as well as syntactically.

Linguistics, 2000

In this paper, I discuss Finnish case alternation adpositions from a theoretical and corpus persp... more In this paper, I discuss Finnish case alternation adpositions from a theoretical and corpus perspective. First, I argue that postpositional PP constructions with genitive case denote the standard spatial meaning of which an extension is marked with partitive case. Also, I show how word order interacts with case assignment. Both findings are formalized in a bidirectional Optimality Theoretic framework. Second, I show that case alternating behavior does not occur unrestrictedly in newspaper corpora. Adpositions in principle tend to assign the same case to the same object over and over again, and only a small subgroup of highly frequent nouns is assigned both genitive and partitive case by the same adposition(s). This suggests that (adpositional case) alternation is only allowed for highly frequent adpositional objects.

Linguistic Discovery, 2013

The driving forces behind variation in the dative construction have stood as a puzzle both from t... more The driving forces behind variation in the dative construction have stood as a puzzle both from the point of view of child language acquisition and in the theoretical syntactic literature addressing adult production. One line of thought attributes these choices to lexical meaning differences among dative verbs ((Gropen et al., 1989) for children; for adults) or to constructional differences in meaning that constrain verb choice . But studies of actual usage are increasingly showing that the mapping between meanings and construction choice is much more flexible than these earlier studies allowed . Additionally, usage studies point to the important role of properties such as end weight and pronominality in determining construction choice for adults .

Case is the result of a grammaticalization process in which frequently used words develop more ge... more Case is the result of a grammaticalization process in which frequently used words develop more general meanings and more economical forms. Since general meanings apply more often and economical forms are preferably used, frequency works as a flywheel. As will be shown in Chapter 2, case expresses the most general and most frequently used meanings, viz. semantic roles. Semantic roles are generalizations about event participants necessary for communication. The semantics of an event participant in a particular event is much richer but cannot efficiently be communicated as such for all individual participants. By categorizing arguments into semantic roles, the speaker can use more economical means of expression, namely the forms corresponding to semantic roles. Using the semantics of the predicate, the hearer can unpack this information again. For example, the Agent of to hit is a ‘hitter’ and the Agent of to walk is a ‘walker’. Structural case can be seen as a high-level generalizatio...

Language Typology and Universals, 2011

This paper discusses a cross-linguistic sample of spatial PPs in languages that both have adposit... more This paper discusses a cross-linguistic sample of spatial PPs in languages that both have adpositions and case. It is shown that the distribution of labor within these potentially complex PPs follows from two general principles only. According to the principle of Grammaticalization, less frequent meaning elements should never be expressed by more grammatical means than more frequent ones. According to the principle of Compositionality, the syntactic construction should reflect the order of semantic function application. The only viable spatial PP constructions according to these principles are those constructions in which the P simultaneously expresses configuration and directionality, and constructions in which the P expresses configuration and the case marker on the P directionality.

Linguistics in the Netherlands, 2008

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

ABSTRACT Path and manner of movement are generally taken to be the core distinguishing features i... more ABSTRACT Path and manner of movement are generally taken to be the core distinguishing features in descriptions of motion events. It is proposed here that this two-dimensional characterization of the lexical semantics of motion verbs needs to be reconsidered. We introduce a new research method, the cross-linguistic dictionary-lookup analysis, by means of which additional meaning dimensions can be identified for motion verbs in Dutch, English and German.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the linguistic ontology of mode (also known as directionality). It ... more ABSTRACT This paper discusses the linguistic ontology of mode (also known as directionality). It is argued that mode is best analyzed in terms of temporally linked locations and that our understanding of a corresponding path of motion probably follows from the conceptual enrichment of the semantics of a motion expression.

Proceedings of the Third ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions - Prepositions '06, 2006

This meeting is supported by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (SIGSEM, http://mcs. ope... more This meeting is supported by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (SIGSEM, http://mcs. open.ac.uk/pp2464/sigsem/), which aims to promote research in all aspects of computational semantics. Two successful workshops endorsed by ACL-SIGSEM devoted to the topic of prepositions were held in Toulouse, France in September 2003, and Colchester, UK in April 2005. Prepositions have received a considerable amount of attention in recent years, due to their importance in computational tasks. For instance, in NLP, PP attachment ambiguities have attracted a lot of attention, and different machine learning techniques have been employed with varying degrees of success. Researchers from various perspectives have also looked at spatial or temporal aspects of prepositions, and their cross-linguistic differences, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts or the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations. Moreover, in languages like English and German, phrasal verbs have also been the subject of considerable effort, ranging from techniques for their automatic extraction from corpora, to methods for the determination of their semantics. In other languages, like Romance languages or Hindi, the focus has been either on the incorporation of the preposition or its inclusion in the prepositional phrase. All these configurations are of much interest semantically as well as syntactically.

Linguistics, 2000

In this paper, I discuss Finnish case alternation adpositions from a theoretical and corpus persp... more In this paper, I discuss Finnish case alternation adpositions from a theoretical and corpus perspective. First, I argue that postpositional PP constructions with genitive case denote the standard spatial meaning of which an extension is marked with partitive case. Also, I show how word order interacts with case assignment. Both findings are formalized in a bidirectional Optimality Theoretic framework. Second, I show that case alternating behavior does not occur unrestrictedly in newspaper corpora. Adpositions in principle tend to assign the same case to the same object over and over again, and only a small subgroup of highly frequent nouns is assigned both genitive and partitive case by the same adposition(s). This suggests that (adpositional case) alternation is only allowed for highly frequent adpositional objects.

Linguistic Discovery, 2013