The spy saw a cop with a telescope: Who has the telescope?

An attempt to understand the basic building blocks of ambiguous PP-attachment sequences

Authors

  • Mengzhu Yan Victoria University of Wellington
  • Michael Hai Nguyen Aarhus University

Keywords:

PP-attachment, Python, ambiguous, parsing

Abstract

This paper explores the problem of ambiguous PP-attachment by extracting information from a PP-attachment corpus using Python. Cases of ambiguous PP-attachment involve sequences of the head words of the following type: verb > noun > preposition > noun. The head nouns of ambiguous PP-attachment sentences, as well as aspects beyond head words, are investigated by testing a number of hypotheses using a corpus of thousands of real-world examples. The hypotheses are partially based on theory and partially on empirical evidence. The results support some theoretical claims while discarding others. For instance, one finding that supports an existing claim is that of-PPs always attach to NPs whose heads are classifiers. This kind of knowledge can be put into practice when parsing natural language.

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Published

2019-02-19

How to Cite

Yan, M., & Nguyen, M. H. (2019). The spy saw a cop with a telescope: Who has the telescope? An attempt to understand the basic building blocks of ambiguous PP-attachment sequences. Journal of Language Works - Sprogvidenskabeligt Studentertidsskrift, 3(2), 92–104. Retrieved from https://tidsskrift.dk/lwo/article/view/112506

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2018)

Section

Articles

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The author/the authors hold the rigths to articles presented in the journal. The author/the authors are granted the right to reproduce their article as they see fit, if they mention LWorks as the original publisher of the article.