Decomposing Prepositional Cases in Russian and Polish (original) (raw)

The Outline of the Quantitative Ontology for Russian Prepositional Constructions

NORDSCI International Conference Proceedings Education and Language edition

The dependency grammars for such languages as Russian usually treat the prepositions in combination with subordinate nouns as major elements as if the case form in the prepositional construction had some self-contained meaning subjected to the regular transformation. This scheme may be valid for languages with restricted declensional paradigms, however, in Russian due to the fact that several case forms are combined with primary prepositions the specific system of joint interpretation of a preposition and a case form is resulted in a system of syntaxemes, minimal syntactical items designed to express semantic notions according to the lexical nature of the governor words in the texts. The syntaxeme structure being the part of the grammatical system has a number of vague manifestations in modern Russian texts which may be acquired from the corpus statistics. The evidences of syntaxeme structure are presented in the ranks of collocations with rough semantic classes of governee nouns with frequent primary prepositions, on the one hand, and the semantico-syntactic role specification of the prepositional construction in the sentence, from the other hand. This structure has several levels of syntactic abstraction. The syntaxeme level is the central layer showing the most frequent combinations of prepositions with noun forms of subordinate semantic classes. Several syntaxemes may be united into the group of so-called semantic rubrics, more or less equal to the semantico-syntactic arguments or roles of the construction in the sentence. The witnesses of semantic rubrics in the texts are usually expressed by secondary prepositions. The bottom level of syntaxeme units is determined by subtle sense variants of the construction produced by the marked semantic classes of governor words of prepositions and governee nouns, which resulted in the merged synonymic and quasi-synonymic usage of prepositional constructions.

A CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR APPROACH TO RUSIAN PREPOSITIONS

SGEM 4th International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts 2017. Sofia,, 2017

The paper provides a construction grammar perspective to identifying meaning of prepositions in Russian. It describes performance of an interpreter uncovering meanings of prepositions in " master " — preposition — " slave " constructions. In contrast to the classical linguistic methodology focusing on the simplest units of different language levels, modern studies practice synthetic methods trying to catch and describe language structures which integrate different language units: words, collocations, etc. Constructions – combinations of lexical, semantic, morphological, syntactical and other features realized in phrases – are of peculiar interest for modern linguists. Complex description and systematization of constructions seek for elaboration of identification methods using manual and automatic techniques as well as analysis of their paradigmatic and syntagmatic features and quantitative analysis of their frequency and strength. The paper features a new method of building the grammar of prepositional constructions for the Russian language (the ontology of Russian prepositions) based on lexical, semantic and morphological contextual markers, as well as one of its possible realisations — the grammar for simple Russian propositions, based on data of the " Syntactical dictionary " by G. Zolotova. The grammar consists of descriptions of lexical and semantic features of meaningful words that build up a context in which some meaning of a preposition is being actualised. The practical and scientific value of this work is connected with the possibility to use its results when computing linguistic tasks in NLP-systems and in further investigation of semantics of prepositions.

On the Syntax of Prepositional Phrases

Interfaces and Interface Conditions, 2007

The standard view about the uniformity of Case assignment by verbs and prepositions is challenged with data from German and an analysis according to which P has a feature structure which involves a Case feature that may not only participate in Case checking but may supply the Case that is missing in the complement of P. Adopting a probe/goal relation of agreement a fair number of peculiarities of the syntax of PPs can be explained such as obligatory pied piping, semantic selection, copy movement, operator scope and the role of adverbial proforms in pronominal PPs. Finally, the asymmetry in Case assignment between V and P is supported by novel data from sentence processing.

Prepositions and Verbal Prefixes: The Case of Slavic

This monograph is concerned with prepositional elements in Slavic languages, prepositions, verbal prefixes and functional elements of prepositional nature. It argues that verbal prefixes are incorporated prepositions projecting its argument structure in the complement position of the verbal root. The meaning of prefixes is based on the two-argument meaning of prepositions, which is enriched with the CAUSE operator, which conjoins the state denoted by the prepositional phrase and the event expressed by the verbal root. This accounts for various effects of prefixation. The book investigates idiomaticity in the realm of prefixed verbs and proposes a novel analysis of non-compositional prefixed verbs. The non-compositional interpretation arises inter alia because of the fact that either the meaning of the verbal part or the meaning of the prepositional part is shifted by means of Nunberg’s (1995) predicate transfer in the course of the derivation. This study also offers a uniform analysis of cases: prepositional as well as non-prepositional cases are treated as a reflection of the operation Agree between Tense-features and phi-features. It presents a new model of prepositional case assignment, in which the type of prepositional case is determined by semantic properties of particular heads of the decomposed preposition. Furthermore, it investigates prepositional movement from diachronic perspective. It is shown that prepositions can be grammaticalised as a functional element of the higher clausal structure.

A corpus based analysis of English, Swedish, Polish, and Russian prepositions

ITRW on Experimental …, 2006

In this study, the use of most frequent spatial prepositions in English, Polish, Swedish, and Russian is analyzed. The prepositions and their contexts are extracted from corpora by means of concordance tools. The collostructional strength between the prepositions and the most frequent nouns in the PPs (Gries et al. 2005) is then computed in order to get a more detailed picture of the contexts in which a given preposition is most likely to appear. The results of the investigation are then analysed within the framework of cognitive semantics, especially Croft and Cruse's (2004) taxonomy of construal operations, and Talmy's (2005) classification of spatial images.

Case Marking and Definiteness in Slavic Appositional Constructions

Slovene, 2023

This paper is a corpus-based study of Slavic appositional constructions. Out of material taken from seven Slavic languages, two aspects of the morphosyntax of close appositions in Slavic are considered: case concord and defi niteness marking. The fi rst section of the paper considers the factors that aff ect case concord in appositions in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, and Slovenian. Based on the data of the corpora it is shown that in all seven languages, inherent plurality and frequency of proper names signifi cantly aff ect the probability of concord being present. Moreover, it is shown that the likelihood of concord diff ers across cases, and almost all languages considered follow the case hierarchy GEN>DAT>LOC>INS.

Prepositional phraseological patterns in Czech and English

Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies

This pilot study aims to identify differences in native and non-native phraseologies, focussing on prepositional patterns. Previous research suggests L2 users’ limited phraseological choices may hinder the accuracy of their language production, and prepositions can pose a particular challenge to Czech learners of English, given the lack of correspondence between translation equivalents. Further, prepositional patterns contribute to text structuring, making them an important part of learners´ competence. Using representative corpora of English and Czech, 3- to 5-grams containing the equivalent preposition pair in/v are extracted. The identified patterns are classified by their semantics and textual functions. While in/v patterns mostly fulfil corresponding functions in the languages compared, the distribution of these functions differs. Specifically, some pattern types are only found in English, highlighting its analytic nature as opposed to inflectional Czech.

Ontological Description of Russian Prepositions∗

2020

The paper deals with a part of a research project which focuses on the development of a corpus-driven semantic-grammatical description of Russian prepositional constructions. In this paper, we investigate the structure of synonymous and quasi-synonymous semantic relations of primary and secondary prepositions in the Russian language. The metalanguage for the identification of a prepositional meaning is described. The methodology for processing corpus data and calculating frequency characteristics of prepositional constructions in modern Russian texts is presented. We demonstrate results of our methodology for the semantics of the locative rubric.

Russian Secondary Prepositions: Methodology of Analysis

2020

The present study proposes a methodology of a corpus-based analysis of Russian secondary prepositions, primarily focusing on multiwords. Secondary prepositions are units motivated by content words (nouns, adverbs, verbs), which may be combined with primary prepositions to form multiword prepositions (MWPs). Multiword prepositions perform the grammatical function of a preposition in a certain position of a syntactic structure in some contexts and can be a free combination in others. A strict division between secondary multiword prepositions and equivalent free word combinations is not specified. This presents an issue in the task of building a language model as compound prepositional units are commonly mislabeled as free combinations or are labelled inconsistently, thus leading to parsing errors with far-reaching consequences. Our larger study aims at solving this problem by identifying, describing and eventually formalizing the full inventory of Russian MWPs, which demands a special...