Prepositional Adverbs

The Syntactic Flexibility of Adverbs: French Degree Adverbs

While French degree words have been assigned several syntactic categories, we show that they are rather highy ‘polymorphic’ adverbs (they occur in all syntactic domains), which select the expression they modify on a purely semantic basis. Like French adverbs in general, they occur both to the left and to the right of the head they modify. Following previous work (a.o. van Noord and Bouma 1994, ...

Comparing adverbs of quantity

Starting out with some intriguing parallels and differences between French beaucoup ‘a lot’ and souvent ‘often’, this paper develops an account of the distributional and semantic properties of four classes of adverbial expressions of quantity: frequency adverbs (souvent), relative degree adverbs (beaucoup), absolute degree adverbs ( un peu ‘a bit’) and x-times adverbs (trois fois ‘three times’)...

Manner Adverbs and Scope

Can Computers Handle Adverbs?

The adverb is the most complicated, and perhaps also the most interesting part of speech. Past research in natural language processing, however, has not dealt seriously with adverbs, though linguists have done significant work on this word class. The current paper draws on this linguistic research to organize an adverbial lexicon which will be useful for information retrieval and natural langua...

Prepositional Reasoning by Model

This article describes a new theory of prepositional reasoning, that is, deductions depending on;/ or, and, and not. The theory proposes that reasoning is a semantic process based on mental models. It assumes that people are able to maintain models of only a limited number of alternative states of affairs, and they accordingly use models representing as much information as possible in an implic...