Treatment of “out of” and “out”

 

The sense inventory for out of in ODE is considerably reduced from what appears in NODE/DIMAP; the preposition has been entirely reworked. In both ODE and NODE, out is treated as a ‘nonstandard contraction’ of out of. In fact out is substitutable for out of in only one sense, the “directional” sense, so I’ve made out prep simply equivalent to out of 6(5).

 

The instances file contains all hits of out and out of in FrameNet. Many instances of out alone are adverbs (mainly directional), and some are phrasal verb particles. Out is not distinguished from out of in the instances file, but I think this won’t matter since out as simply an informal variant of one sense of out of.

 

New Sense added:

NODE had a sense for out of defined as “moving or situated away from a place.” It’s unclear why this is eliminated in ODE, since it is by far the most common sense. I’ve restored it here as a new sense, number 6(5), slightly expanded for our purposes. SRType: Directional, since the entire PP always serves as an adverbial of direction. I conceive it slightly broader than NODE, so that it includes, for example, not only sentences like “he walked out (of) the door” but also “she admired it out (of) the window” and “I noticed it out (of) the corner of my eye.” Definition: indicating the point from which, or the direction along which something happens, with reference to a point in space. The majority of out instances marked “adverb” in the Instances file share a meaning element with this sense, since the directional sense of out as an adverb is by far the most common. See also below under “Notes from the spreadsheets concerning this sense and adverbial “out.”

 

Other instances of out and out of that may deserve idiomatic treatment

The informal phrase “out of it” is somewhat problematic in that it may represent any of two or three standard slang meanings (these are in ODE as phrases), or it may be a bona fide PP where ‘it’ has an antecedent.

 

The idiomatic phrase out of your mind/brain/wits also probably parses as a PP; there are some instances in FrameNet. I have labeled them as belonging to sense 5(4), which is generally a negating sense.

 

A usage of out not covered by ODE or Quirk that would probably parse as a PP is an informal sentence like “We were out $50 and had nothing to show for it,” or “She was out all that money.” I believe this can only follow a copula.

 

 

Notes from the spreadsheets:

Sense 5(4) ThingLacking is considerably expanded from what appears in ODE, which says only “not having (a particular thing).” The examples given in ODE show that this sense is the negation of many phrases that make a positive statement using ‘in’ or ‘into,’ so I have treated it in that spirit and lumped here many phrases that are the negations of these: talk/cajole/persuade sb out of sth, run out of luck, back out of an agreement, con sb out of something.

 

The combination of Frame Self_Motion and Element Source can have only one use of “out” – the directional sense 6(5) noted above. Many of the isolated FrameNet instances of out in this context are adverbs, but when not adverbs they are always this directional sense. In the interest of saving time, I simply labeled all of the instances of this combination as sense 6(5) from letter H to Z (this was the point at which I decided the pattern was invariable), rather than looking at individual instances and noting which were adverbs, which were prepositions. The result is the same, since any of the verbs (and they are all verbs) can be followed by out as an adverb, head of an out PP, or head of an out of PP with essentially the same meaning: he lurched out, he lurched out the door, he lurched out of the door.