The Oxford Dictionary of English defines preposition as “a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause”.  A few years ago, Bill Dolan, quoting Lucy Vanderwende (both of the Microsoft NLP group), suggested that prepositions are essentially just syntactic reflexes that have […]

A construction pattern attempts to characterize the usage of each sense in such a way that it can be used to disambiguate among the several senses of a word. Constructions are becoming more widely used, as described in Atkins & Rundell, The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography. The authors describe patterns for verbs, nouns, adjectives, […]