Parsing Decomposable Idioms

Verbal idioms can be divided into two main groups: non-compositional idioms as kick the bucket and composit ional /decomposable idioms as spill the beans. In the following we will point to the fact that there are German decomposable idioms which can be decomposed into components, having identifiable meanings contributing to the meaning of the whole. These idiom compoimnts are taken to have referents. Taking these facts into account we propose an adequate way to represent the idiomatic meaning by Kamp ' s Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Furthermore, we show how to parse idiomatic sentences and how to process the proposed seinantic representation. While parsing idioms, the necessary idiomatic knowledge of the idioms' syntax and semantics is ext racted from a special idiomatic knowledge base called PIIRASEO-LI.]X. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Today it becomes more and more evident that a too restricted view on idiomatic phenomena is of limited use for the purpose of natural language processing. Therefore, it is now widely accepted that we have to distinguish at least two groups of figurative verbal phrasal idioms: first, there is a group of syntactically frozen idioms as kick the bucket, meaning "die", which are called noncompositional. Second, there is a group which shows more syntactic and semantic flexibility. An example for the ,latter group, often called compositional or decomposable I idioms, is spill the beans 1 By classfying idioms with the terms compositional respectively decomposable the same property is decribed by two different point of views. The first notion is a more structural term, the second notion a more process oriented term. See (Geeraerts, 1992). nleaning "divulge infbrnmtion". With this group we are dealing here in depth. In this paper we propose an adequate semantic representation for idiomatic knowledge and show a way of processing syntax and semantics of decomposable idioms. In the following we will first; deal with the idea of decomposability of idioms in section 2. In section 3 we will present our proposal of an adequate representation of the idioms' meaning by means of DRT. Before we will outline a way of processing decomposable idioms in section 5, we will briefly introduce the necessary tools for the parsing process in a few brief words in section 4. Finally, in section 6 we show some possible extensions. 2 D e c o m p o s a b l e i d i o m s a n d t h e r e f e r e n t i a l s t a t u s o f t h e i r i d i o m