[Corpora-List] Phrasal Verbs

[J Washtell]

Well, yes, the (rather well hidden) subtext of my message did not  
really concern phrasal verbs and propositions (for which I care very  
little), but rather, the consistency and dependability of  
tagged/parser corpora.

 From an NLP perspective (roughly where I'm sitting), it would seem  
that we would not need to invoke the distinction between phrasal verbs  
and propositions if the other will invariably do (will give us a  
satisfactory parse, and allow our applications to function). However,  
I thought that one significant criterion for a phrasal verb, for  
example, is that the particle significantly changes the "meaning" of  
the verb. e.g. "throw" versus "throw up" (compare "throw upwards").   
One can see this being a potentially important distinction from the  
perspective of computational lexical semantics, machine translation  
etc, when tagged/parsed corpora are to be used (as with words ending  
"i" being indisciminately tagged as plurals - last week's rude  
awakening).

You *seem* to imply that a person needs to come up with a  
well-justified grammar of their own before they can question those  
which seem to be embodied in the tools they are using. I would  
strongly disagree with that. As you observe, we are not all linguists.  
It seems to me that extremely important questions relevant to  
non-linguists on this list are: Are these taggers/parsers getting  
things wrong with respect to the *[linguistic] intentions of their  
design*? If so who's actually noticing? Do/should these products come  
with a verifyable description of the [linguistic] assumptions/rules  
they embody? If they did, would anybody read/understand them? Or would  
we chose to trust the linguists who we assume were involved in every  
step of the process?

Justin Washtell
University of Leeds


Quoting Brett Reynolds <brett at forsyths.ca>:

> On 9-Dec-08, at 7:09 PM, J Washtell wrote:
>
>> Sorry to be picky... but in the case of abseiling down the alps, I
>> would say that "down" would almost certainly be considered a
>> preposition, as opposed to a particle of a phrasal verb.
>
> Indeed, this is the corpora mailing list, not the corpus linguistics
> mailing list, but it does seem that linguistic analysis gets too much
> of a back seat.
>
> On p. 274, Huddleston and Pullum's _Cambridge Grammar of the English
> Language_ observes that "the term phrasal verb implies that the
> combinations concerned form syntactic constituents belonging to the
> category verb." But they argue that these are no more constituents
> than, for example, "I |went to| the store" or " I |received it from|
> my wife."
>
> I'm not suggesting that you have to buy their analysis, but you
> clearly have to come up with explicit and defensible criteria for
> what constitutes a "phrasal verb".
>
> Best,
> Brett
>
> <http://english-jack.blogspot.com>
>
> -----------------------
> Brett Reynolds
> English Language Centre
> Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
> Toronto, Ontario, Canada
> brett.reynolds at humber.ca
>
>
>
>
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>



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