Locative alternation in English and Russian: A frame semantic analysis

Abstract

In this paper, an analysis of locative alternation phenomena in Russian and English within the framework of compositional frame semantics and Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (LTAG) is proposed. It features a compositional approach to locative alternation in both discussed languages and takes advantage of the possibility of separating construction meaning from the meaning of lexical elements provided in LTAG. As an additional decomposition step, metagrammar descriptions for both syntactic and semantic representations are given. Moreover, for Russian the decomposition goes further towards the morphology-semantics interface which makes it possible to account for the differences in the behavior of verbs with different prefixes (or no prefix) with respect to locative alternation. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.