Opposing to the behaviorist approach, the alternative approach proposed by Chomsky believes that language acquisition cannot be accounted for without considering a linguistically specific system of Principles and Parameters which every healthy child is expected to have genetically in his or her mind. A set of absolute Universals, Notions and Principles exist in the UG which do not vary from one...

Computer programs that make inferences about natural language are easily fooled by the often haphazard relationship between words and their meanings. This thesis develops Lexical Semantic Analysis (LxSA), a general-purpose framework for describing word groupings and meanings in context. LxSA marries comprehensive linguistic annotation of corpora with engineering of statistical natural language ...

Language learning is one of the most complicated feats that human beings accomplish. Any number of very real reasons exist as to why L2 learning presents tremendous challenges. However, instructed L2 learning has been further complicated by the fact that important elements of systematicity that exist in language have not been appropriately captured by the pedagogical grammars which underlie mod...

PrepLex is a lexicon of French prepositions which provides all the syntactic information needed for parsing. It was built by comparing and merging several authoritative lexical sources. This lexicon also includes information about the prepositions or classes of prepositions that appear in French verb subcategorization frames. This resource has been developed as a first step in making current Fr...

The place concept has field structure. As in the semantic configuration, nucleus of “space” is highlighted, and remaining components can be interpreted as peripherals. space distinguished by dative ablative cases. case Russian language assumed through prepositions. After prepositions “k”, “po”, “blagodarya” nouns show meaning. using semantically goes to locative meanings provides use these cons...

Can relations described by English nounnoun compounds be adequately captured by prepositions? We attempt to answer this question in a data-driven way, using gamification to annotate a set of about a thousand noun-noun compound examples. Annotators could make a choice out of five prepositions generated with the help of paraphrases found in the Google ngram corpus. We show that there is substanti...

Corpora from the Pattern Dictionary of English Prepositions (PDEP) provide the basis for examining the behavior of 304 English prepositions, with 1040 senses (patterns) describing in 20 fields. The PDEP corpora comprise dependency parses for 81,509 sentences in CoNLL-X format, previously used in several studies, particularly used for disambiguation modeling. We have now put these parse data int...

Fundamental to amassing a lexicon of relational terms (i.e., verbs, prepositions) is the ability to abstract and categorize spatial relations such as a figure (e.g., boy) moving along a path (e.g., around the barn). Three studies examine how infants learn to categorize path over changes in manner, or how an action is performed (e.g., running vs. crawling). Experiment 1 (n = 60) finds that 10- t...

We consider the semantics of prepositions, revisiting a broad-coverage annotation scheme used for annotating all 4,250 preposition tokens in a 55,000 word corpus of English. Attempts to apply the scheme to adpositions and case markers in other languages, as well as some problematic cases in English, have led us to reconsider the assumption that an adposition’s lexical contribution is equivalent...