A construction grammar approach to prepositional phrase attachment: Semantic feature analysis of V NP1 into NP2 construction

Abstract

This paper provides a construction grammar perspective to identifying the ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachments (i.e., whether a PP is attached to the closest VP or NP1). Despite the wide discussion of these two structures (VP-attached and NP1-attached), we raise the possibility for a third parsing structure (about 11.3% from all 1845 instances analyzed), a co-attachment to both verb and noun. A co-attachment structure denotes the lack of [movement] feature in both the verb and noun surrounding a PP. This proposal is arrived when we annotate the semantic feature [-movement] to both VP and NP1, respectively, in a caused-motion construction of V NP1 into NP2 (e.g., vote an individual into the presidency; shamed us into pity; define ourselves into a box). © 2011 by Liyin Chen, Siaw-Fong Chung, and Chao-Lin Liu.