Optimality Theory - Lexical Functional Grammar: filtering PP ambiguities in PDE

This research project proposes the incorporation of a semantic constraints-based mechanism, i.e. a- structures, in the input of an OT-LFG model as an effective technique to disambiguate the syntactic reading of PPs as either adjuncts or arguments, a common error in parsing. The little literature existent on this topic was combined to define the model's parameters. The study analysed a corpus sample extracted from the British National Corpus comprising a total of 1000 tokens of data for variants "with" and "for". The analysis accounts for the syntactic interpretation of the PPs as either adjuncts or arguments, and also for the internal structure of the PP attachment itself as for type of argument. The final results have not been assessed, but they are expected to be in line with the trends found in the pilot study and preliminary data analysis. There are patterns of frequency between verbs and the rate at which they take the PP as either type of argument. There are also patterns of frequency between nouns immediately preceding the preposition and the rate at which the verb selects the PP as an adjunct or as an argument. Additionally, these preferences relate to general semantic-syntactic properties shared by particular groups of words that form categorical relationships. The tool operates under the syntactic-semantic generalisations found through the patterns and transferred into a- structures.