Abstract The paper investigates the use of PPs, specifically prepositions and case marking on their DP arguments, in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), using data from a map task experiment. Since prepositional phrases combine semantic properties with morpho-syntactic properties, PPs allow us to investigate relative vulnerability both domains at once. Our results show that w...

Reduced hearing acuity is among the most prevalent of chronic medical conditions among older adults. An experiment is reported in which comprehension of spoken sentences was tested for older adults with good hearing acuity or with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and young adults with age-normal hearing. Comprehension was measured by participants' ability to determine the agent of an action in ...

Prepositions in natural languages often appear to be governed by arbitrary conventionalized idiomatic uses (e.g., I was born in May, I will see you on Sunday). We present empirical evidence that such prepositional uses are not entirely arbitrary, as they activate image-schematic perceptual simulations during language processing. In Experiment 1, native speakers of English were prompted to think...

This paper a t t e m p t s to demons t r a t e the u s e f u l n e s s f o r Machine T r a n s l a t i o n of a c a s e o r i e n t e d d e s c r i p t i o n of the s y n t a c t i c and the semant ic b e h a v i o r of a d v e r b i a l and p r e p o s i t i o n a l c o n s t r u c t i o n s . Ee aim to modify and r e f i n e the e x i s t i n g d e s c r i p t i o h s of adverbs and p r e p o...

1. Introduction To resolve or not to resolve, that is the structural ambiguity dilemma. The traditional wisdom is to disambiguate only when it matters in terms of the meaning of the utterance, and to do so using the computationally least costly information. NLP work on PP-attachment has followed this wisdom, and much effort has been focused on formulating structural and lexical strategies for r...

This paper argues that double-object verbs decompose into two heads, an external-argument-selecting cause predicate (vCAUSE) and a prepositional element, PHAVE. Two primary types of argument are presented. First, a consideration of the well-known Oerhle’s generalization effects in English motivate such a decomposition, in combination with a consideration of idioms in ditransitive structures. Th...

We present an approach to simultaneously perform semantic segmentation and prepositional phrase attachment resolution for captioned images. The motivation for this work comes from the fact that some ambiguities in language simply cannot be resolved without simultaneously reasoning about an associated image. If we consider the sentence “I shot an elephant in my pajamas”, looking at the language ...