=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2780/paper17
|storemode=property
|title=Russian Secondary Prepositions: Methodology of Analysis
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2780/paper17.pdf
|volume=Vol-2780
|authors=Victor Zakharov,Anastasia Golovina,Elena Alexeeva,Vadim Gudkov
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/acl-cmcl/ZakharovGAG20
}}
==Russian Secondary Prepositions: Methodology of Analysis==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2780/paper17.pdf
Russian Secondary Prepositions: Methodology
of Analysis
Victor Zakharov[0000-0003-0522-7469], Anastasia Golovina[0000-0002-9239-2050],
Elena Alexeeva[0000-0002-3841-3199], Vadim Gudkov[0000-0003-2152-9598]
St. Petersburg University, Saint Petersburg 199034, Russia
v.zakharov@spbu.ru
Abstract. The present study proposes a methodology of a corpus-based analysis
of Russian secondary prepositions, primarily focusing on multiwords. Secondary
prepositions are units motivated by content words (nouns, adverbs, verbs), which
may be combined with primary prepositions to form multiword prepositions
(MWPs). Multiword prepositions perform the grammatical function of a prepo-
sition in a certain position of a syntactic structure in some contexts and can be a
free combination in others. A strict division between secondary multiword prep-
ositions and equivalent free word combinations is not specified. This presents an
issue in the task of building a language model as compound prepositional units
are commonly mislabeled as free combinations or are labelled inconsistently,
thus leading to parsing errors with far-reaching consequences. Our larger study
aims at solving this problem by identifying, describing and eventually formaliz-
ing the full inventory of Russian MWPs, which demands a special corpus-based
research. This paper is devoted to statistical analysis of the use of secondary mul-
tiword prepositions in corpora using prepositions expressing causal relations as
the base material. The features of multiword prepositions in the function of a
preposition are described. Statistical data on the ratio of the use of individual
multiword expressions as prepositional units and as free combinations are pro-
vided.
Keywords: Russian language, secondary prepositions, multiword prepositions,
corpus statistics.
1 Introduction
This study is part of a large project with the goal of creating the first corpus-driven
semantic-grammatical description of Russian prepositional constructions. A number of
tasks are planned to achieve this goal, with the following at the base level:
─ development of a high-precision language model for extracting prepositional con-
structions;
─ development of a high-precision language model for morphological analysis of
structural elements.
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons
License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
2
However, the creation of such models, or even use of the existing ones, is hampered by
one circumstance. While primary prepositions in Russian are well-studied and de-
scribed (most importantly, there exist exhaustive lists of these entities), the same cannot
be said about secondary prepositions. In fact, even the volume of this subclass is un-
known. In language models available for Russian, secondary prepositions are handled
inconsistently; more on this in Section 2.2. At the same time, it is obvious that accurate
and consistent annotation is crucial for building a language model that represents real
language use (which is, after all, its main purpose). We believe that secondary preposi-
tions, and MWPs in particular, should be given more attention in language model de-
velopment. We are addressing this by building our own models for the designated pur-
poses with special focus on secondary prepositions as part of our project. However, to
begin with, we must first find out what these units are characterized by as a subclass
and what entities it includes as their detailed formal description is not yet available in
Russian linguistics.
Generally speaking, the preposition is a common part of speech found in many lan-
guages. Its frequency naturally varies but tends to be quite high. In Russian, preposi-
tions have been found to constitute on average 10% of all tokens [1]. That makes the
preposition a regular constituent of the language system. Consequently, automatic
recognition and analysis of prepositions is crucial in numerous NLP tasks, such as prep-
ositional phrase attachment [2], syntactic role acquisition, word sense disambiguation
for discriminating between senses of polysemous word [3], information retrieval [4]
and automatic ontology extraction [5].
Russian linguistic tradition implies subdivision of the class of prepositions into pri-
mary and secondary ones by origin as well as simple (one word) and complex (multi-
word) units by structure. While the primary preposition subclass is relatively well-stud-
ied and sufficiently documented, secondary prepositions, especially multiword ones,
have not enjoyed equal attention in linguistic literature despite making up a large part
of prepositions as a class. The reason for the ambiguous status of most of these units
lies largely in the issue of their identification and the overall lack of agreement over the
base features of a preposition among linguists.
The vague and complex prepositional semantics lies at the centre of many disputes
on the nature of prepositions. Primary prepositions are highly polysemous. For instance,
the Russian preposition в ‘in’ has 23 meanings in the Dictionary of the Russian Lan-
guage [6]. The majority of them are quite rare, in some cases the preposition is a part
of an idiom. The meanings of prepositions in explanatory dictionaries are usually ex-
pressed descriptively or by other synonyms, forming a “vicious circle”. Prepositional
ambiguity is manifested in the complex nature of the prepositional meaning and in se-
lective preferences of certain prepositions, depending on context. That alone makes the
systematization of the prepositional class a very complicated and tedious undertaking.
The existing schemes of lexical and syntactic structuring of the Russian prepositional
system found in [7–9] have led us to the conception of the prepositional ontology. The
main problem of such an ontology is its inherent inconsistency stemming from the na-
ture of the base material since the ontological structure presupposes logical analysis of
concepts, while prepositions are usually interpreted as elements that have no lexical
meaning. Therefore, a prepositional ontology has a significant difference from a classic
3
one. It is an ontology of lexico-grammatical relations implied in prepositional construc-
tions. Thus, in agreement with [9] we consider prepositional meaning to be the relation
found in prepositional constructions where it should be regarded as a special type of
relationship between content words.
We regard this notion as a semi-grammatical language component linking fuzzy lex-
ico-semantic word classes by the hierarchical set of grammatical relations. These rela-
tions are established by the combination of a particular preposition, the semantic type
of the lexeme attaching the prepositional construction, and the semantic class and gram-
matical form of the governee (dependent). An additional factor in the proposed view
on the prepositional meaning is the case of the governee. We believe that the preposi-
tion should be studied in conjunction with the associated case as the case is often the
key factor in identifying the meaning of the preposition in identical contexts (compare
e.g.: маршировали в зале (Loc) vs. маршировали в залу (Acc) “marched in the hall”
vs. “marched into the hall”).
We believe that such an ontology cannot be built from top to bottom. We advocate
a data-based, bottom-up corpus approach and focus on usage models. A similar ap-
proach was adopted in building the dictionary of English preposition templates
(PDEP) [10]. The connections and relationships between the objects of our ontology
(syntaxemes), in turn, can also be identified by means of the corpus approach. Such
relations are usually calculated using the vector space model [11]. Our approach is
closer to [12], where machine learning is used. We rely on corpus statistics. The corpus-
based semantic and grammatical description of Russian prepositional constructions
uses empirical data from various corpora of the modern Russian language to identify
and then formalize the main ontological semantic patterns of “prepositional grammar”.
In [13] we suggest that the ontology of prepositions has a hierarchical structure. The
most abstract concepts are semantic rubrics that are implemented in the form of syn-
taxemes on the second level. This term was proposed by G.A. Zolotova [9] as a desig-
nation of minimal syntactic-morphological prepositional constructions that have certain
meanings. Syntaxemes can be divided into subtypes (subsyntaxemes) that convey lex-
ical and grammatical meanings and can be expressed by primary or secondary preposi-
tions in various text forms. Concepts from all ontological levels have a primarily gram-
matical nature, which requires a special quantitative and grammatical approach for fur-
ther structuring.
A prepositional syntaxeme is characterized by a morphological arrangement (prep-
osition plus noun case form) that has a unity of form and meaning that functions as a
constructive and meaningful component of a phrase or a sentence. Syntaxemes in
Zolotova's original description resemble semantic roles or specification of arguments:
locative, temporal, directive, destinative, correlation, quantitative, mediative, qualita-
tive etc. A typical syntaxeme is expressed in several prepositional templates.
An important step in the building of the proposed ontology is the identification of
the entities comprising it. As has already been mentioned, Russian prepositions are a
fuzzy class, with secondary prepositions being its most problematic subset, which is
why further specification and analysis of this subclass is crucial to our understating of
how the prepositional system could be organized.
4
2 Russian Secondary Prepositions
2.1 Related Work
While much research has been dedicated to primary prepositions, the same cannot be
said about secondary prepositions. In fact, as of now we have yet to obtain an exhaus-
tive list of the elements of this set. This is, however, not to say that secondary preposi-
tions have not been examined and catalogued altogether.
Perhaps the most well-structured inventory of Russian secondary prepositions can
be found in the Russian Grammar [14]. A sizeable list of secondary prepositions along
with their case government is presented after the description of each subtype (according
to the part of speech they derive from and their structural type) in the source mentioned.
However, no summary list of secondary prepositions is provided. Even more im-
portantly, it is noted by the author that a lot of the units listed are entities of uncertain
part-of-speech status due to their preserved ability to include determiners and combine
selectively with the other parts of the potential prepositional phrase [14: §1661].
The Explanatory Dictionary of Functional Parts of Speech of the Russian Lan-
guage [15], another work touching on the subject, contains less than 300 secondary
prepositions. Much fewer – just 157 – are found in the Explanatory Dictionary of Com-
binations Equivalent to a Word [16].
Overall, secondary prepositions tend to be overlooked in favour of primary ones in
most of the relevant sources.
2.2 Secondary Prepositions in UD Models
Prepositions are naturally included in most language models, but their handling, as has
been mentioned previously, is quite inconsistent.
For the purposes delineated in the introduction, we have studied the available lan-
guage models for Russian and developed our own prepositional phrase extraction
tool [17] based on the Universal Dependencies (UD) models available in the CONLL-
U format [18]. However, while prepositional constructions with primary prepositions
can generally be extracted with little trouble, those with secondary prepositions present
a serious problem in the task of identifying a prepositional phrase. This is best demon-
strated on the following example. The UD_Russian-SynTagRus model, based on the
syntactically annotated part of the Russian National Corpus, SynTagRus, contains 73
simple prepositions, primary and secondary, as identified by the ADP tag, and 26
MWPs, identified as a sequence of tokens connected by the fixed relation with at least
one ADP token among them. The UD_Russian-Taiga model, based on the Taiga corpus,
contains 81 simple prepositions and 25 MWPs. The numbers indicate an obvious dis-
crepancy in the lists of entities recognized as prepositions in the models: while the prep-
ositional inventories intersect, they are not identical. Additionally, the numbers of prep-
ositions, MWPs in particular, annotated as such appear to be alarmingly low in both
cases. Thus, the extraction of prepositional phrases is only available for those entities
which are recognized as simple or multiword prepositions in a given model.
5
The annotation of prepositions in UD models is debatable in general. It appears that
secondary prepositions, especially multiword ones, tend to be neglected when develop-
ing an annotation scheme. [19] name the flat internal structure, lack of common POS
tag, discrepancies between lists of such units among the main issues of multiword en-
tities in the current UD annotation standard. In [Kahane and Gerdes, 2016] the authors
point out that the preference for relations between notion words as per the UD standard
leads to inconsistencies in the case of one-word secondary prepositions which retain
the features of notion words as well as incorrect annotation of MWPs, which tend to be
encoded compositionally instead of as a semantic unit.
Poor definition of the secondary preposition subclass and especially the subpar han-
dling of prepositional multiword entities make the use of the existing language models
in the task of prepositional phrase extraction and analysis a risky endeavor. As our own
study aims to describe the Russian prepositional system as a whole, we cannot rely on
the available resources blindly while being aware of the issues mentioned. This
prompted us to formulate a more in-depth base description of the secondary preposition
subclass as well as form our own list of these units.
2.3 Secondary Prepositions: An Overview
Secondary prepositions are words and word combinations that have taken on the func-
tion of a preposition at some point of language development. Structurally these units
can be subdivided into simple and complex (multiword) ones.
Simple secondary prepositions are usually fully homonymous with some word form
of their motivating content word or a different part of speech sharing the same root. The
same words and word units may perform as prepositions as well as other parts of speech
(e.g.: силами ‘by force of’ – noun, снаружи ‘outside’ – adverb, исключая ‘excluding’
– verb (participle).
Multiword prepositions (MWPs) make up a large part of secondary prepositions.
Structurally speaking, a multiword preposition is a combination of a content word and
one or two simple adpositions. MWPs can be divided into nominal, adverbial or verbal
units based on the part of speech of the motivating content word. Most MWPs contain
only one adposition preceding or following the content word (e.g.: рядом с ‘close to’,
в результате ‘as a result’), but some include two adpositions enclosing the content
element (e.g.: в соответствии с ‘in accordance with’, по направлению к ‘toward, in
the direction of’). The most commonly observed structural patterns of MWPs are
Prep+N, Prep+N+Prep and Adv+Prep, where Prep stands for preposition, N for noun,
Adv for adverb. Much like simple secondary prepositions, multiword prepositional
units perform as prepositions in some contexts and as free word combination in others
(e.g.: в форме ‘in the form of’: preposition + noun, что до ‘as for’: conjunction +
preposition; начиная с ‘starting with’: verb + preposition).
As a rule, the distinction between these ambiguous entities is outlined neither in
grammar books nor in dictionaries. The homonymy presents an additional issue for a
corpus-driven study, which is why we have decided to organize the investigation of
secondary prepositions by their structural type. Our current paper is devoted mainly to
secondary multiword prepositions.
6
Overall, the MWP subclass is quite diverse, which is a direct consequence of its size.
Our research has uncovered a great number of multiword prepositions, with some of
them having up to four morphonological (e.g.: в сравнении/сравненье с/со ‘compared
to’) and spelling (e.g.: в счет/счёт ‘on account of’) variations. The great variety of
MWPs on all language levels implies the necessity of an in-depth analysis of their com-
mon features. In other words, we need to understand, firstly, what unites such diverse
entities in order to be able to discern free combinations from MWPs.
2.4 Characteristic Features of Multiword Prepositions
As has already been stated, prepositional multiword entities do not always function
unambiguously as MWPs, but rather do so sometimes. Those units whose prepositional
function is their dominant one can be regarded as the core elements of the multiword
preposition subclass. In order to define its limits, we have formulated the following
preliminary list of the main characteristic features of multiword prepositions:
MWP performs the grammatical function of a preposition in a certain syntactic po-
sition as part of a prepositional phrase; that is, it governs a noun or a nominalised
word (sometimes an infinitive).
MWP inherits the semantics of the notion word (noun, verb); it derives from as well
as its valency (на основе ‘on the grounds of’ – основа чего? ‘the grounds of what?’;
в зависимости от ‘depending on’ – зависеть от чего? ‘to depend on what?’; с
целью ‘with the aim to’ – цель что сделать? ‘aim to do what?’).
As a rule, it contains one or two primary prepositions.
Its nominal components tend to have abstract semantics.
It has a relatively high frequency among multiword units of the same structural type.
It is idiomatised, i.e. its nominal component loses its lexical meaning to an extent
(which is why MWPs are sometimes called “prepositional idioms”).
The grammatical number of the noun cannot be changed (it is either singular or plu-
ral).
It has a primary preposition as a synonym.
In most cases, it does not allow for insertion or separation (as a rule, the noun cannot
have a possessive or adjectival determiner).
All of these features are characterised by significant statistical regularity.
The presented list was initially meant to serve as a guideline. However, we soon real-
ized the importance of relying on more clearly and precisely defined and formalized
features. Our current study is intended to be a step towards clarifying some of them and
defining others more narrowly through studying how these features manifest (or do not
manifest) themselves in the potential MWPs in real texts. In order to demonstrate that
our proposals are based on real language use we mostly focus on the features that lend
themselves to statistical description and analysis on corpus material in this paper.
7
3 Materials
Our main research is dedicated to the entire class of prepositions. In order to obtain the
fullest inventory of the units in question we have compiled a table of Russian preposi-
tions totalling 740 entries (including variations) based on a number of linguistic sources
(dictionaries, grammar guides, corpora, syntax parsers), including those mentioned in
Section 2.1. Naturally, the degree of “prepositionality” of these entities varies. The con-
tents of this table were used as the base material of our study.
As the current study has multiword prepositions as its main focus, the pool of rele-
vant prepositions has been narrowed down to 445 multiword units. A general statistical
overview of the whole set has been provided by us in [20]. However, as our goal was
to study the main features relevant to all MWPs, it has been concluded that a smaller
selection would be sufficient for the stated purpose. Therefore, we have settled on a
subset of the original list that only contained prepositions expressing causal relations.
While approaches to semantic classification of prepositions naturally vary, it is gener-
ally agreed upon that prepositions can be used to express cause and effect. Our selection
consists of 13 multiword preposition candidates that have been observed to express
causal or causal-adjacent relations:
в зависимости от ‘depending on’
в ответ на ‘in response to’
в преддверии ‘on the eve of, at the forefront of’
в результате ‘as a result of’
в свете ‘in light of’
в связи с ‘due to’
в силу ‘by force of’
за счёт ‘on account of’
исходя из ‘drawing from’
на основании ‘on the basis of’
на основе ‘based on’
на почве ‘on the ground of’
по причине ‘because of, for the reason of’
The results of the statistical analysis presented in this article have been acquired mainly
on the Araneum Russicum III Maius corpus (1.25 billion tokens) created by Vladimír
Benko (Comenius University in Bratislava, Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics, Slovakia)
(www.unesco.uniba.sk). Those features that are more lexically or semantically inclined
are subject to future qualitative and quantitative studies.
The Russian National Corpus (www.ruscorpora.ru), the joint project of the Russian
Academy of Sciences and multiple research institutions, was also used for more de-
tailed research on some of the features. The main corpus (over 320 million tokens) was
chosen due to its considerable size as well as the inclusion of the subcorpus with man-
ually resolved morphological homonymy, which is relevant to the task at hand.
8
4 Results
4.1 Structural Features of Causative MWPs
The first set of features to observe is the structure of the MWPs in question. 10 out of
13 units are bigrams of a content word and a simple adposition, which appears to be the
most typical MWP structure. 9 of the bigram units follow the structural pattern of
Prep+Noun, one has the less common pattern of Verb+Prep. The remaining 3 out of 13
units are trigrams consisting of a noun between two adpositions.
As has been noted by us in [11], the three simple adpositions most commonly used
as elements of multiword prepositions are в, на, по. Out of the 13 items under current
study, 7 contain the preposition в, 4 contain на, 1 contains по. Also present are the less
frequently found in MWPs but nonetheless typical prepositions от, с, за, из.
Most of the content words in the causative MWPs refer to the two nodes of causal
relations: the reason (основание ‘foundation’, основа ‘base’, почва ‘ground’, причина
‘reason’) and the effect (ответ ‘response’, результат ‘result’), as well as the relation
itself (зависимость ‘dependency’, связь ‘connection’, сила ‘force’). The semantics of
the motivating content words correspond with the observed tendency of MWP compo-
nent nouns to lean towards abstraction.
Another point of interest is the use of the content words as MWP components in
comparison to their general corpus frequency. The table below demonstrates the rela-
tive frequencies (in ipm) of the content words in question as well as the frequencies of
the MWPs themselves.
Table 1. Frequency counts of nouns found in causative MWPs, ipm
Base word MWP Base word, As MWP com- % of MWP
ipm ponent, ipm use
В преддве-
Преддверие 11.30 10.79 95
рии/ рьи/рие/рье
Зависимость В зависимости от(о) 171.10 111.62 65
Исходить Исходя из(о) 77.10 44.70 58
Счёт За счё/ет 303.00 137.05 45
Связь В связи с(о) 346.90 119.00 34
Основа На основе 314.60 105.38 33
Основание На основании 174.90 57.32 33
Результат В результате 604.70 173.78 29
Сила В силу 452.70 52.70 12
Причина По причине 341.90 19.70 6
Ответ В ответ на 239.80 11.35 5
Почва На почве 60.90 2.84 5
Свет В свете 196.10 7.68 4
9
As demonstrated by the table, most of the content words retain their relative independ-
ence as they are not bound to the other parts of the MWPs. Only one of them, в
преддверии, appears to be a set phrase in which the motivating word has fallen out of
use.
4.2 Statistical Analysis of Causative MWPs
In order to gain a clearer understanding of how prepositional units perform as MWPs
and free combinations as well as how frequently either of the states occurs we have
studied the use of the causative prepositional units in the corpus. In order to do that we
have obtained the top 50 highest frequency ngrams for each of the prepositional units
in question and their immediate context, which in most cases consisted of the nearest
left or right neighbour token(s). The resulting construction lists have been studied and
tagged by hand according to the function the prepositional unit performs in the given
context: “MWP” or “free combination”. The frequencies of these two states have been
then translated into percentages of prepositional use in the studied selection. The results
are presented in Table 2.
Table 2. Percentage of prepositional use of MWP candidates among top 50 frequency ngrams
in Araneum Russicum Maius and 50 random contexts in the RNC
MWP % of prepositional % of prepositional
use, AR use, RNC
В преддверии/-рьи/-рие/-рье 100 98
В зависимости от(о) 100 98
Исходя из(о) 100 100
За счё/ет 88 100
В связи с(о) 100 100
На основе 82 82
На основании 100 100
В результате 100 54
По причине 86 96
В ответ на 100 98
На почве 100 96
В свете 84 78
В силу 90 80
The results show that the distribution of prepositional use of the word combinations in
question is quite similar in the two corpora despite the difference in the sample and
corpus parameters. In addition to the stable occurrence of prepositional uses in different
textual contexts, the results demonstrate that these word combinations are mostly used
as prepositions and not free word combinations.
10
Among the non-prepositional uses discovered in the samples most were cases of free
combinations of a simple preposition and the content word used in one of its primary
meanings. For example, the MWP candidate на основе ‘on the basis of’ was found to
be a free word combination in contexts referring to the physical basis of an entity, e.g.
[X] “на основе гиалуроновой кислоты” (‘hyaluronic acid-based [X]’); similarly,
word combination в свете ‘in light of’ was used literally in contexts where the gov-
ernee belonged to the semantic class of objects capable of emanating light, e.g. “в
свете заходящего солнца” (‘in the light of the setting sun’). One MWP candidate, в
результате ‘as a result of’, is homonymous with the adverbial modifier в результате
‘as a result’, which led to the inclusion of the adverbial modifier in the context sample
as the case of the governee was not predefined in the corpus search. The context win-
dow approach used in the work on the Araneum Russicum Maius corpus was therefore
unable to yield useful data on the distribution of prepositional uses of the word combi-
nation in question. The MWP candidate в силу ‘by force of, due to’ was found to be
used occasionally as a free combination ([верить] в силу ‘[believe] in the force’) and
as part of an adverbial idiom ([вступить] в силу ‘come into power’), which led to the
relatively lower observed percentage of its prepositional use as well.
4.3 General Observed Tendencies
Some general observations were made in the course of the ngram frequency analysis
described in the previous section. While the data provided in Table 2 is primarily based
on the analysis of the left and right context windows, some additional procedures were
used in order to study the variability of the selected prepositional units. Thus, in addi-
tion to obtaining data on the immediate context neighbours of the MWP candidates we
have also studied whether the prepositional unit allows for modifier insertion, such as
an adjective or an adverb before or after the content word, as well as whether restraining
the query by adding case markers to the potential prepositional phrase governee token
makes a meaningful difference to the proportion of prepositional uses of the MWP can-
didate in the resulting concordance. Therefore, the procedures taken for most of the
units under study were the following:
Frequency analysis of the immediate neighbour tokens of the prepositional unit with
no case restraint
Frequency analysis of the immediate neighbour tokens of the prepositional unit with
a case restraint
Frequency analysis of the node components in a modifier-enabled query for the prep-
ositional unit with no case restraint
Frequency analysis of the node components in a modifier-enabled query for the prep-
ositional unit with a case restraint
In some cases the POS tag distribution within a query of any kind was also taken into
consideration.
The following tendencies of some MWPs were uncovered as a result.
Firstly, a high number of the causative prepositional units were found to take the
initial position in a sentence or a clause as evidenced by the inclusion of punctuation
11
marks and conjunctions in the top frequency lists of their immediate left neighbour
tokens. Periods, commas and the conjunction и ‘and’ were found among the top 5 left
neighbours of the prepositional units в результате, в свете, исходя из, за счёт, в
силу. The tendency for the initial sentence/clause position can be explained by the se-
mantics of the relation expressed by means of the MWPs in question. Causative prep-
ositions serve to connect events rather than objects and their features, which is why
more complex syntax structures, such as clause or sentence sequences, are needed to
express cause-and-effect relations.
Secondly, the identification of prepositional vs. free uses of some MWP candidates
was found to be a difficult task in the absence of either the governor or the governee of
the prepositional phrase. For instance, resolution of the contextual homonymy of the
prepositions в зависимости от, в результате, в силу and their free equivalents ap-
pears to rely mainly on their governors as their semantic classes seem to be more re-
stricted than those of the governees. The most frequent governors in prepositional usage
cases belong to the group of verbs and verbal nouns expressing change of state, e.g.
получить ‘receive’, возникать ‘appear’, образоваться ‘form’ for в результате ‘as
a result of’, or expressing difference, e.g. меняться ‘change’, варьироваться ‘vary’,
отличаться ‘differ’ for в зависимости от ‘depending on’. For в силу ‘due to, by
force of’ the governors were useful in identifying free usage cases, e.g. вступление
‘entry’, вступить ‘come’, верить ‘believe’ [in(to) (the) power]. Inversely, the ho-
monymy resolution of the MWP candidates в свете, в преддверии was more success-
ful in the presence of their governees. As such, contexts with the governees фары
‘headlights’, фонари ‘street lamps’, луна ‘the moon’ for в свете ‘in light of’ and рот
‘mouth’, влагалище ‘vagina’ for в преддверии ‘at the forefront of’ were found to be
free word combinations.
A few of the MWP candidates were discovered to frequently serve as components
of conjunctional phrases with the demonstrative pronoun то ‘that’. В зависимости от
(ipm 111.6) and в связи с (ipm 114.6) are particularly remarkable examples boasting
ipm frequencies of 8.1 for the conjunctional phrase в зависимости от того, … ‘de-
pending on…’, and 8.8 for в связи с тем, … ‘due to…’. The fact that these preposi-
tional units have become part of a more complex structure implies two things. First of
all, it is indirect evidence of the prepositionality of these units as they have apparently
created a very stable prepositional bond with the pronoun. Secondly, it is necessary for
us to decide whether such structures should be regarded as an inseparable whole and
therefore excluded from the statistical analysis of the MWP components in question.
Finally, two curious usage cases were discovered while examining the context sam-
ples of MWP components исходя из ‘drawing from’ and по причине ‘because of, for
the reason of’. Исходя из was found to be used prepositionally in the syntax structure
‘исходя из:
─ [point 1],
─ [point 2], ...’.
The structure itself is not uncommon in real written texts but is atypical from the point
of view of traditional prepositional syntax, which presupposes the positioning of the
governee(s) without any punctuation marks after the preposition. Primary prepositions
12
(в, из-за, к, о, с and others) have been observed to occur in this structure as well, which
supports the prepositional status of the word combination исходя из. Another interest-
ing case is that of the MWP candidate по причине, which has been found to bind com-
monly enough with direct quotes, e.g. по причине “не повышают зарплату” ‘for the
reason “[they are] not raising the pay”’. As the quoted verbal structure is not declinable
(has no case marker) and serves as an attribute for the content word причина ‘reason’,
the prepositional unit is most likely a special case of a free word combination rather
than a preposition in such contexts.
4.4 Separability of Causative MWPs
A special point of interest is the separability of MWPs, that is, the allowance for mod-
ifier insertion into the MWP structure. In order to study this phenomenon, we have
examined context samples of the causative MWP candidates with and without content
word modifiers.
Overall, our presupposition that insertion is atypical for MWPs has been proven true.
Since most of the content words in our MWP candidate selection are nouns, it was
primarily adjectival modifiers that were found splitting the original prepositional unit
structure. As per the list of characteristic features of MWPs, the motivating nominal
component loses its lexical meaning to a degree when the unit is used as a preposition
to allow it to perform the basic prepositional function of conveying a relation between
the governor and the governee of the prepositional phrase. However, when modifier
insertion takes place, the semantic weight of the whole construction figuratively shifts
back to the modified noun, which retains its original lexical meaning. Therefore, the
resulting structure can no longer perform the prepositional function and can only be
regarded as a free word combination. The table below demonstrates this phenomenon
observed in the 10 most frequent modified structures for the MWP candidate в свете.
Table 3. 10 most frequent prepositional structures with an adjectival modifier for в свете ‘in
light of’ (ipm 7.68, Araneum Russicum Maius)
Modified structure Translation Frequency in cor-
pus, ipm
В новом свете In a new light 0.33
В этом свете In this light 0.28
В лучшем свете In the best light 0.24
В выгодном свете In a favorable light 0.22
В лунном свете In the moonlight 0.22
В ином свете In another light 0.12
В другом свете In a different light 0.11
В таком свете In such light 0.09
В солнечном свете In the sunlight 0.09
В негативном свете In a negative light 0.09
13
The examples make it apparent that the modified construction can no longer perform
as a causative preposition.
However, two types of modifier insertion were found to not disturb the prepositional
function of the studied MWP candidates.
Firstly, some nominal causative MWPs do not seem to lose their function in the case
of anaphoric use of personal pronouns, such as на его почве ‘on his [its] ground’, в её
преддверии ‘on her [its] eve’. Out of a sample of 34 contexts of the phrase в его
результате ‘as its result’ 26 uses were found to be prepositional, 8 were not. The
MWP retained its function when the inserted pronoun referred to a previously named
entity. The structure is typically used to avoid repetition, e.g. беспрецедентное
журналистское расследование и всплывшие в его результате ужасающие
факты “an unprecedented journalistic investigation and the horrifying facts that have
emerged as its result”.
Secondly, исходя из, a verbal MWP, retained its function when the modifying part
of speech was a particle, with the most common ones being только ‘only’, лишь
‘merely’, не ‘not’, именно ‘precisely’, уже ‘already’, исключительно ‘exclusively’.
As Russian particles are function words with no independent lexical meaning and serve
to express modality or impart shades of meaning to the modified notion word, their
function does not appear to interfere with the prepositional function of the modified
phrase.
Therefore, we can conclude that causative MWPs generally do not allow for inser-
tion (modification of the content component) except when the modifier is a personal
pronoun modifying the nominal component or a particle modifying the verbal compo-
nent. Whether this rule applies to the entirety of the MWP class is subject to further
investigation.
5 Conclusion and Future Work
The current paper deals with the complex aspects of Russian multiword prepositions
(MWPs). These units may perform as prepositional entities with particular grammatical
semantics or manifest themselves as free combinations in which each word has its own
meaning and syntactic function. While MWPs are a large and diverse subclass, they are
nonetheless characterised by a number of common features and, therefore, lend them-
selves to description, definition and measurement.
The aim of the study presented in the paper was to test out the proposed methodology
of determining the prepositional status of multiword prepositional units using a set of
units expressing causal relations. The experiments described in this paper are explora-
tory in nature but will be calibrated and conducted further with the purpose of acquiring
the first comprehensive description of the subclass in question.
All of the observations presented in the paper suggest that the bottom-up corpus-
based approach is indispensable in the task of studying multiword units of ambiguous
status owing to the direct focus on real patterns of usage. However, the context window
method used in the study appears to be insufficiently effective as the actual governor
and governee, which are crucial in prepositional phrase identification, are not always
14
captured by the window. The quality of automatically extracted prepositional construc-
tions could be improved through the use of specialized corpus tools, such as the Word
Sketches tool of the Sketch Engine system. An even more effective approach would
involve full syntax parsing, even though it also does not guarantee errorless extraction.
An alternative approach is the use of treebanks, although their limitations in volume
and annotation present a challenge of its own.
Further stages of our research include expansion of the application of the methodol-
ogy presented in this paper to the entirety of the MWP subclass. The separability of the
components of a multiword preposition is to be examined on a wider variety of MWPs.
Additionally, research on the prepositional use in fixed phrases and idioms as well
as clusters of conditional synonymy has been started, which will hopefully help in de-
fining the status of MWP candidates more precisely.
Automatic recognition and analysis of MWPs plays an important role in a number
of key NLP tasks: prepositional phrase attachment, syntactic role acquisition, corpus
annotation, multiword unit recognition, word sense disambiguation, etc. The results
obtained promise to help solve these tasks with greater accuracy given the volume of
the MWP subclass in the already sizeable class of prepositions. Being the first of its
kind for Russian secondary multiword prepositions, our study provides an insight into
the ambivalent nature of these entities and will hopefully contribute both to the theo-
retical description of the Russian prepositional system and to the solution of the practi-
cal problems of computational linguistics.
6 Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research [grant No. 17-
29-09159 “Quantitative grammar of Russian prepositional constructions”].
Authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to the 2nd year students of the SPbU
Mathematical Linguistics Department for their valuable help in annotating the data.
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