Treatment of “along”

 

The sense inventory in ODE and NODE/DIMAP is identical.

 

Notes from the spreadsheet:

The senses analyzed occur only in the Sense Analysis Summary for now; I have not broken out a separate spreadsheet.

 

New sense added: ODE omits the important sense of along meaning “in accordance with”: partition the republic along ethnic lines. Definition: “in accordance with”. This is numbered as sense 4(3) in the summary spreadsheet. SRType: ReferenceScale. A frequent marker of this sense is the word “lines” modified by an adjective: along ethnic/economic/these/similar lines.

 

Other instances of along that may deserve idiomatic treatment

Along with, noted as a phrase in ODE, is treated as a separate preposition. The few instances tagged as “along” by FrameNet but that are in fact “along with,” are included in this file. Note that “along with” can easily be inherited by with “Accompanier.”

 

Other Notes:

All the true instances of “along” shake out pretty easily. Those involving movement are 1(1); those involving arrangement or placement along a line are 3(2). I did not see sense 2(1a) PathOfProgress — is a figurative extension of the core sense — in the instances file, but it’s possible that there are instances of it tagged by FN taggers as the literal sense, since it has the same collocates – I did not look at most instances of the Path element individually, as these all seem to have to do with movement.