Title: Coping with Construals in Broad-Coverage Semantic Annotation of Adpositions,
Abstract: We consider the semantics of prepositions, revisiting a broad-coverage
annotation scheme used for annotating all 4,250 preposition tokens in a 55,000
word corpus of English. Attempts to apply the scheme to adpositions and case
markers in other languages, as well as some problematic cases in English, have
led us to reconsider the assumption that a preposition's lexical contribution
is equivalent to the role/relation that it mediates. Our proposal is to embrace
the potential for construal in adposition use, expressing such phenomena
directly at the token level to manage complexity and avoid sense proliferation.
We suggest a framework to represent both the scene role and the adposition's
lexical function so they can be annotated at scale---supporting automatic,
statistical processing of domain-general language---and sketch how this
representation would inform a constructional analysis.