Preliminary Recommendations

Type

Attribute Value It. example It. tag

Type preposition di, a, da E

In Italian, simple prepositions are separated into two categories:

1. A closed set `di', `a', `da', `in', `con', `su', `per', `fra' and `tra' which is used to express a number of syntactic relations.
2. A larger set with more specific meanings, e.g. `sopra', `sotto', `prima', `dopo', `senza', etc. These constitute a crux in tagging because they are involved in transcategorisation phenomena (see Conjunctions).

The tag is E.

Most of the prepositions in category 2 require the presence of another preposition before the argument, e.g. ``sopra di noi''. This raises the problem of which strategy to choose in multiword expression tagging (Leech & Wilson, 1993a).