2010/01/01 by Sander Lestrade · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Natural Language Processing Techniques
paper · doi:10.1515/ling.2010.019
In this article, I discuss Finnish case alternation adpositions from a theoretical and corpus perspective.First, I argue that postpositional PP constructions with genitive case denote the standard spatial meaning of which an extension is marked with partitive case.Also, I show how word order interacts with case assignment.Both findings are formalized in a bidirectional Optimality Theoretic framework.Second, I show that case alternating behavior does not occur unrestrictedly in newspaper corpora.Adpositions in principle tend to assign the same case to the same object over and over again, and only a small subgroup of highly frequent nouns is assigned both genitive and partitive case by the same adposition(s).This suggests that (adpositional case) alternations are only allowed for highly frequent constructions.