Algorithms for Identifying the Multiple Syntactic Categories and Meanings of the Word Over

The word over, among others, is associated with a great variety of syntactic categories and meanings. Although over has received attention from scholars in different frameworks for various aspects, there is little research, to my knowledge, to take a comprehensive approach to both syntax and semantics of the word over. This article proposes algorithms for identifying from the context a case of over with one of four syntactic categories and with one of seventeen meanings. The test was carried out manually on five hundred instances of over from British National Corpus. The results are promising, with 95 percent of the classification of the instances being correct. This study, while taking an idealistic approach, brings to light methods that may stretch the limits of natural language processing.