Abstract
This paper describes an analysis for possessive idioms in English (e.g. ˋI twiddle my thumbs' ˋˋI am idle''). The analysis relies on matching at the semantic level, to allow for syntactic variation. It has been implemented in the English Resource Grammar, and tested by parsing a subset of the British National Corpus. In addition to the syntactic analysis, we have linked the idioms to entries in the Princeton Wordnet, to allow for further lexical semantic analysis.
Highlights
Idiomatic constructions are very common in language, both at a type and token level
In this paper we focus on possessive idiomatic constructions: prototypically those in which one constituent is modified by a possessive pronoun co-indexed with a different constituent
The immediate motivation for this research was for machine translation: when translating out of English, typically the idiomatic possessive pronoun should be omitted
Summary
Idiomatic constructions are very common in language, both at a type and token level. Despite considerable effort in categorizing and analyzing them (Nunberg et al, 1994; Moon, 1998; Sag et al, 2002) they are still not adequately represented in lexical resources, neither in lexicons such as wordnet (Fellbaum, 1998) or grammars such as the English Resource Grammar (Flickinger, 2000). A typical example is wrack one’s brains “think hard”, where the possessor of the brains must be the subject: I wrack my brains; You wrack your brains; Kim wracks their brains. These are interesting theoretically because of the interaction between syntax and semantics and are of practical interest in translation (Bond, 2005). For example Kim racks her brains “Kim thinks hard” is given the unlikely literal translation by the statistical machine translations systems used by Google and Bing translate (1: translated on 2015-10-16). We present our idiom database, our analysis, and some corpus results,
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