German particle verbs : compositionality at the syntax-semantics interface

Particle verbs represent a type of multi-word expression composed of a base verb and a particle. The meaning of the particle verb is often, but not always, derived from the meaning of the base verb, sometimes in quite complex ways. In this work, we computationally assess the levels of German particle verb compositionality by applying distributional semantic models. Furthermore, we investigate properties of German particle verbs at the syntax-semantics interface that influence their degrees of compositionality: (i) regularity in semantic particle verb derivation and (ii) transfer of syntactic subcategorization from base verbs to particle verbs. Our distributional models show that both superficial window co-occurrence models as well as theoretically well-founded syntactic models are sensitive to subcategorization frame transfer and can be used to predict degrees of particle verb compositionality, with window models performing better even though they are conceptually and computationally simpler.