Preliminary Recommendations

 

Function

A number of prepositions in Greek display a deviation from the typical syntactic behaviour of prepositions. As typical behaviour we consider the cases where the preposition is followed by:

• A nominal phrase in an oblique case (i.e. mainly the accusative case, more rarely, the genitive, and, only for a few ancient prepositions that are still but rarely used in the Modern Greek language, the dative case):

  ``Vghykame me to Ghianny.'' -- acc.
  ``Ftasame ekei dhia tys plaghias odhou.'' -- gen.
  ``En suneheia, tha suzytysoume ektenestera to thema auto.'' -- dat.

• An adverb, but only for the prepositions `ghia', `apo' and `kata':

  ``Yrthame apo ekei.''

• A clitic pronoun, but only for the prepositions `metaxu', `anametaxu', `uper', `enantion', `enwpion':

  ``Ta dhylwse enwpion mas.''

On the borderline of this behaviour, we find two groups of elements:

1. A group of six prepositions, namely `ghia', `mehri', `hwris', `dhihws', `isame' and `anti', can be followed by the particle `na' and, in this case, they show similar behaviour to that of conjunctions given that they introduce secondary sentences:

   ``Tha kanei ta panta ghia na fughei o Kwstas.''
   ``Efughe hwris na mas hairetysei.''
   

   In order to account for the particular nature of this group, the feature function has been introduced in the ILSP tagset. Therefore, the distinction holds between pure and conjunctive prepositions. This feature is intended to be used at a later stage, for syntactic processing.

   Attribute Value Gr. example Gr. tag

   Function pure me PpSp000000Pu

   conjunctive ghia PpSp000000Cj

2. A group of elements which, in addition to being found in the typical linguistic contexts for prepositions, may also be found in syntactic contexts considered typical of adverbs, i.e.:
   • Standing on their own, or
   • Followed by a preposition:

     ``Mpyke meta to gheuma.'' -- noun phrase in acc.
     ``Mpyke meta.'' -- nothing
     ``Mpyke meta apo to gheuma.'' -- prep. phrase

   We decided to use the syntactic behaviour as a criterion for distinguishing between prepositions and adverbs, given that, in Greek, these two are easily confused, granted that prepositions slide over time from the category of prepositions to that of adverbs. Thus, those elements that display both behaviours are coded twice in the Morphological Lexicon, as adverbs and prepositions, and disambiguation during corpus tagging is performed on the basis of a rule taking advantage of the linguistic context:

   ``Mpyke meta to gheuma.'' -- prep.
   ``Mpyke meta apo to gheuma.'' -- adv.
   ``Mpyke meta.'' -- adv.

   There is one exception to this rule, namely `anti', which is considered always a preposition, although it can be followed by a preposition. This preposition is considered a special case for three reasons:

   1. It can never stand alone, in the way that adverbs do.
   2. It is the whole compound `anti ghia' that acts as a preposition, having the same meaning as the simple `anti'.
   3. When followed by any other preposition besides `ghia', it is due to elliptical speech, as it is the same preposition that introduced the element that is replaced:

      ``Anti tou Ghianny yrthe y Maria.'' -- gen.
      ``Anti ghia to Ghianny yrthe y Maria.'' -- prep. `ghia'
      ``Aghorase apo to mpakaly anti apo to manavy.'' -- prep.