A Construction Grammar Approach to Prepositional Phrase Attachment: Semantic Feature Analysis of V NP1 into NP2 Construction

A Construction Grammar Approach to Prepositional Phrase Attachment: Semantic Feature Analysis of V NP1 into NP2 Construction* Liyin Chena, Siaw-Fong Chunga, and Chao-Lin Liub aDepartment of English, National Chengchi University, NO. 64, Sec 2, ZhiNan Rd., Wenshan District, Taipei City 11605, Taiwan {98551505, sfchung}@nccu.edu.tw bDepartment of Computer Science, National Chengchi University, NO. 64, Sec 2, ZhiNan Rd., Wenshan District, Taipei City 11605, Taiwan chaolin@nccu.edu.tw Abstract. This paper provides a construction grammar perspective to identifying the ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachments (i.e., whether a PP is attached to the closest VP or NP1). Despite the wide discussion of these two structures (VP-attached and NP1-attached), we raise the possibility for a third parsing structure (about 11.3% from all 1845 instances analyzed), a co-attachment to both verb and noun. A co-attachment structure denotes the lack of [movement] feature in both the verb and noun surrounding a PP. This proposal is arrived when we annotate the semantic feature [-movement] to both VP and NP1, respectively, in a caused-motion construction of V NP1 into NP2 (e.g., vote an individual into the presidency; shamed us into pity; define ourselves into a box). Keywords: construction grammar, prepositional phrase attachment, caused-motion construction. 1 Introduction The preposition into describes the path of motion event which typical involves an object, or figure, moves along the path to enter a reference object, or ground (Talmy, 2000). An example of motion event is the caused-motion construction involving a verb (V) and two noun phrases (NP1 and NP2) as a direct and an indirect object, respectively. Sentence (1), extracted from the Penn Treebank Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Corpus1 (Charniak, et al., 2000), illustrates such a V NP1 into NP2 construction (shown in bold with lexical categories glossed underneath). The basic semantics of the construction involves a motion event that requires the direct object (NP1) to be moved and directed to the confinement of indirect object (NP2). In this case, an unspecified number of airplanes undergo movement towards a deictic space. (1) To shove even more airplanes into this space is asking for trouble, V NP1 Prep NP2 experts say. (WSJ-V1141) However, this type of prepositional phrases poses an ambiguity problem in parsing. Sentence (1) serves as an example for one means of parsing in which the preposition closely associates with the verb but not NP1. The second possibility of parsing is where the PP is required to be interpreted with NP1, as illustrated in bold in sentence (2). * The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this work. This study is supported in part by National Science Council Research Grants (NSC 99-2410-H-004-206-, NSC 100-2628-H-004-137-, and NSC-100-2221-E-004-014). 1 All the examples discussed in this paper are from the WSJ corpus unless specified. Copyright 2011 by Liyin Chen, Siaw-Fong Chung, and Chao-Lin Liu 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 607–614 607 (2) And he soon became aware that the government was able to show a flow of millions of dollars in illicit funds into …

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