Open AccessTowards a grammar of preposition-noun combinations
Author(s) -
Tibor Kiss
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2008.7
Subject(s) - computer science , rule based machine translation , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , linguistics , noun phrase , grammar , noun , head driven phrase structure grammar , point (geometry) , mathematics , generative grammar , philosophy , geometry
Preposition-noun combinations (PNCs) are compositional andproductive, but not fully regular. In school grammars and manytheoretical approaches, PNCs are neglected, but they have recentlybeen addressed in an HPSG analysis by Baldwin et al. (2006). Afterdiscussing some basic properties of PNCs, we show that statisticalmethods can be employed to prove that PNCs are indeed productiveand compositional, which again implies that PNCs should receive asyntactic analysis. Such an analysis, however, is impeded by thelimited regularity of the construction. We will point out why addingsemantic conditions to syntactic schemata might be necessary but notsufficient and turn then to a framework which allows the derivation ofsyntactic (and semantic) generalizations from linguistic data withouttaking recourse to introspective judgments.