A Minimal Recursion Semantic Analysis of Locatives

Abstract

The article describes a pilot implementation of a grammar containing different types of locative PPs. In particular, we investigate the distinction between static and directional locatives, and between different types of directional locatives. Locatives may act as modifiers as well as referring expressions depending on the syntactic context. We handle this with a single lexical entry. The implementation is of Norwegian locatives, but English locatives are both discussed and compared to Norwegian locatives. The semantic analysis is based on a proposal by Markus Kracht (2002), and we show how this analysis can be incorporated into Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) (Copestake et al. 2005). We discuss how the resulting system may be applied in a transfer-based machine translation system, and how we can map from a shallow MRS representation to a deeper semantic representation.