Cudgeling our brains over possessive idioms

Francis Bond

Nanyang Technological University, Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies

Francis Bond Nanyang Technological University, Singapore In this talk I show the wide variety of possessive idioms used in English, and how hard they are to model in a semantic network such as wordnet. We introduce a more complex representation that includes both syntactic and semantic information, and show how this can be used to identify them in parsing and model their underlying meaning. We also investigate variation in the metaphors, and show how little there appears to be for this class of idiom.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Ashraf Khamis.