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A Multilingual Analysis of the Notion of Instrumentality

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A Multilingual Analysis of the Notion of Instrumentality A Multilingual Analysis of the Notion of Instrumentality Asanee Kawtrakul, Mukda Suktarachan (Kasetsart univ. Bangkok, Thailand), Bali Ranaivo-Malancon, Pek Kuan Ng, (Univ. Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia), Achla Raina (IIT Kanpur, India), Sudeshna Sarkar (IIT Kharagpur, India), Alda Mari (Enst-Cnrs, Paris, France), Sina Zarriess (Universitat¨ Potsdam, Germany), Elixabete Murguia (Univ. Deusto, Bilbao, Spain), Patrick Saint-Dizier (Irit-Cnrs, Toulouse, France) Abstract notion and also because instruments are generally modifiers, not arguments. Instruments are expressed in language by In this paper, we address instrumentality as con- various means: prepositions, postposi- veyed by prepositions or equivalent means (e.g. tions, affixes including case marks, nonfi- postpositions, affixes). Our aim in this study nite verbs, etc. We consider here 12 lan- is twofold: (1) to identify the conceptual facets guages from five families in order to be of instrumentality so that a conceptual seman- able to identify the different meaning com- tics can be defined in the spirit of (Talmy, 01, ponents that structure instrumentality. 03), (Wierzbicka 92, 96) and (2) to elaborate an 1 Credits accurate enough model for answering questions about instruments within a cooperative question- This work has been made possible partly via the answering system. Instead of focusing on a spe- STIC-Asia cooperation framework. cific language to elaborate all possible forms of instrumentality, we found it more adequate to de- 2 Introduction velop a multilingual approach, considering lan- It is difficult to give a comprehensive definition of guages from various families. what instrumentality is. In WordNet it is defined We consider for Europe: German, Spanish, as ’an artifact, or a set of artifacts, that are instru- French, Italian; for India: Kashmiri, Urdu, Hindi mental (i.e. behave as instruments) in accomplish- and Bengali; for the far-east: Thai and Malay; ing some end’, i.e. reaching a certain goal. In for Northern Africa and the Middle East: Ara- this definition, the triple relation agent-instrument- bic, and Berber dialects (in the group of Amazigh goal (as in: John cuts the bread with a knife, where languages). In this paper, we use the first let- John is agent, knife is instrument that does the cut- ter of each language to identify it: Thai, Malay, ting, and bread cut is the goal), is left vague in Hindi, Urdu, Kashmiri, Bengali, German, Span- what concerns the exact involvement of the agent ish, French, Italian, Arabic, BeRber). We have and the instrument in the action, and the control also more or less adequately transcribed characters the agent has on the instrument and on the action into latin characters. The upper case A is equiva- (Mari and St-Dizier 01). lent to aa. If almost anything can be an instrument, we can nevertheless formulate a few criteria that we will 3 An overview of preposition structures try to elaborate in this paper. First, an instrument 3.1 European languages is basically non volitional. When humans play the role of instruments, they are obviously volitional, German, Spanish, Italian and French, like most but the action is controlled by another agent who European languages have prepositions that in- acts as an ’initiator agent’, taking the initiative of troduce instrumental PPs. The most current the action. Instruments cannot be easily associated prepositions are: with traditional thematic roles, in fact this is not - German: mit, mit Hilfe von, of much interest, because this is too superficial a mittels, durch, anhand, kraft, Proceedings of the Third ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions, pages 51–56, Trento, Italy, April 2006. c 2006 Association for Computational Linguistics 51 dank, per. action verb and the instrumental noun. ge is only - French: avec, par, au moyen de, used in spatial contexts involving means of trans- graceˆ a,` a` l’aide de, a` travers. portation (travelling by plane), kh is used only in - Spanish: con, en, por, a traves´ de, spatial contexts involving paths. mediante, por medio de, a base de, con la ayuda de, gracias a. 3.3 The Indic language family - Italian: con, per mezzo di, tramite, The four languages considered, Kashmiri (Raina, per, grazie a, con l’aiuto di. 02), Urdu, Hindi and Bengali, share some simil- itudes due to their common origins but also contrasts that result from independent evolutions 3.2 Arabic and Berber which are useful to our analysis. They all have suf- fixes and postpositions. Case suffixes (vibakhti) Arabic essentially has the preposition bi, used as are added to nouns or pronouns, but case suf- a prefix of the noun it heads: fixes do not correspond strictly to thematic roles Aktoub bi al kalami (I write with a pen). (kAraka). Postpositions may also be used instead bi can also be associated with a specific noun of vibhaktis or in conjunction with them, as a kind or deverbal form (e.g. ’by applying’) to char- or re-inforcement. Basically, but with some nu- acterize in more depth the instrumental relation. ances, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Kashmiri lan- This entails generic forms such as bi-tarika, guages have the following kernels: bi-istemali (by means of, the first form rein- forces the importance of the instrument, while the direct instrument: se (H/U), sity (K), -e/-te, • latter is more formal) and bi-fadli (thanks to). diye after null, dwArA after -r (B). Example: For example, we have a kind of nominal form is- H: raam ne chaabi se taala khola (ram - erg. tikhdam (= using or with the use of, constructed key with lock open-past= Ram openened the from the root ’use’) in: lock with a key). Fasser el massala bi istikhdam mithel (explain a problem ’with the use of’ example). Arabic makes means instrument: me (H/U), ke zariye (U), • explicit the metonymy we have in European lan- manz (K), -e/-te (B). Example: U: raam guages. gaadi ke zariye daftar gayaa (ram car by There are a few other prepositions such as min means of office go-past = Ram went to work khilal (through) and min a to express the du- by car). ality source + instrument of the argument (as in causal instrument: ke kaaran (H), ki vajah se drink with a bottle, litterally). In the spatial con- • text, au can be used (to reach the top by this trail), (U), kiny (K), kArANe, kripAya (B). Exam- sayaahat kiny and ala is used to express a channel of commu- ple: K: dil chi amir (Delhi be- nication. present tourism with rich = Delhi is rich with tourism), Berber is composed of a large number of di- B: dillI paryatan-er khAtire samriddha or dillI alects, some just spoken in small ’tribes’, others paryatan-er kripAya samriddha (Delhi be- in larger communities. It is basically dialectal, but rich-er thanks to tourism) a number of common elements can be identified. We consider here Berber from the Moroccan Rif, agentive instrument: ke dwaraa (H) ke zariye • and the Algerian Kabyle. The main instrumental (U) zariy, desi (K), diye (B) after -ke when preposition is eg` , but prefixes are also used s-, the nominal form is animate and specific, ge-, th-, kh- which affect the morphology diye after null when the nominal form is an- of the noun they are attached to. The prefix s- imate and general (B). Example: H: raam ne is widely used, with some variants (si, sei, shyaam dwara apna kaam karvaaya (ram erg. so in Kabyle), eg` (also realized as g’ or ge in shyam by self’s work do-cause-past = Ram some places), is appropriate only when the action got his work done by Shyam) is under full control of the agent. It is not em- ployed when the instrument is abstract. In the Rif action instrumentalised: kar (H/U), kerith • area, s- focusses on the instrument contributing to (K). Example: U: raam kuud kar ghar ke an- the action, it makes a kind of fusion between the dar daakhil huaa (ram jump participle house 52 into enter-past = Ram entered the house by built from stems which are instrumental nouns, jumping in it) this allows for the construction of the equivalent of PPs, based on the prototypical use of the instru- There are less important cases that capture no- mental noun. The most common being: prefixes: tions like containment, which will be detailed in beR- (from kuda, horse, berkuda, on horseback), section 5. Postpositions may vary also depending meN- (from kunci, key, mengunci, lock with key), on the semantic type of the NP they head. prefix + suffix: meN- + -kan (from paku, nail, In Bengali, case is indicated in several ways. memakukan, to fasten with nails), and with suffix Vibhaktis are suffixes that are added to the stems -i (from ubat, medicine, mengubati, by means of to form surface forms of words. In Bengali the medicine). Prepositions occur as the head of PPs, nominal stems take one of the following suffixes: and in verb particle constructions. PPs may also null or shunya vibhakti, -e, -te, -r, etc. Case is also be subject complements, avoiding the use of verbs indicated in Bengali by the use of postpositions. (dia di rumah, she at home). Besides affixes, We have, for example: Cut bread with a knife, re- Malay has 6 prepositions that denote instrumen- alized as either: tality: dengan, melalui, mengikut, 1. chhuri diye ruti kATa (knife diye bread cut), or: menerusi, dengan menggunakan, 2. chhuri-te ruti kAta (knife-te bread cut) secara. Postpositions in Bengali are derived from certain A simple example is: inflected forms of nouns, and also certain verbs berhubung - melalui - telefon (communicate - by - in participle form. When these words are used telephone). as postpositions they are often not considered in their original sense but define a specific type of re- lationship of the noun phrase with the finite verb 4 The meaning components of phrase in the sentence.
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