Collocational prepositional phrases like ten koste van (at the expense of), met het oog op (with an eye on), and onder het mom van (under the pretext of) are patterns of the form P-NP-P, which have a non-compositional semantics and which are syntactically rigid or idiosyncratic. We present a number of linguistic tests which set such items apart from regularly built prepositional phrases. To fin...

the arabic grammarians call the “main preposition + genitive noun” and an “adverb” a “prepositional phrase”. for prepositional phrases to assimilate into the sentence structure and fulfill their roles, they should have a specific connection and link to another part of the sentence. this link is called “attachment” and that part is named “attached phrase”. consequently, a prepositional phrase ca...

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments and adjuncts are initially processed in the sam...

The possible-word constraint (PWC; Norris, McQueen, Cutler, & Butterfield, 1997) has been proposed as a language-universal segmentation principle: Lexical candidates are disfavoured if the resulting segmentation of continuous speech leads to vowelless residues in the input-for example, single consonants. Three word-spotting experiments investigated segmentation in Slovak, a language with single...

Work on PP attachment resolution generally assumes that there is an oracle that provides the two hypothesized structures that we want to choose between. The information that there are two possible attachment sites and the information about the lexical heads of those phrases is usually extracted from gold standard parse trees. We show that the performance of reattachment methods is higher with s...