Multiword Expressions

Pages

• Adjective Phrase MWEs
• Foreign MWEs
• Miscellaneous MWEs
• Nominal Compounds
• Prepositional Verb MWEs
• Verb Phrase MWEs
• Verb-Particle Constructions

Definition

General issues to consider

1. Which of the (lexicalized) words is the syntactic head, i.e., it takes all the other lexicalized words as dependents in the derivation and bears inflections?

2. Which of the words is the semantic head, i.e., it specifies any idiosyncratic aspects of the meaning?

3. How to treat the semantics of lexicalized words other than the semantic head? Do they have null semantics?

4. How to assign categories such that the idosyncratic lexical entries are limited to instances of the MWE?

References

• Baldwin & Kim 2010, Multiword Expressions. In N. Indurkhya and F. J. Damerau (eds.), Handbook of Natural Language Processing, Second Edition.
• Ch. 3 of Nathan’s disseration

MWEs in CCG

• Lancioni & Boella 2012, Idiomatic MWEs and Machine Translation: A Retrieval and Representation Model: The AraMWE Project. Proc. of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages.
  • §3.2 describes a proof-of-concept grammar of 18 English and 18 Arabic verbal MWEs, including kick the bucket. See figures 1, 3, and 4. Apparently, their solution assigns no semantics to the direct object NP and the idiomatic verb has no constraint on which direct objects it licenses.
• de Lhoneux 2014. CCG Parsing and Multiword Expressions. MS Thesis, Edinburgh [supervised by Mark and Omri].