English Phrasal Verbs in Ontological Semantics

The purpose of the present study is to describe and analyze the acquisition of English Phrasal Verbs into the Knowledge Base Acquisition Editor, a Natural Language Processing database based on the framework of the ontological semantics theory. The present study is an account for both structural and semantic diversity of phrasal verbs. By classifying phrasal verbs into subgroups according to their meaning and then distributing them among four basic templates with respect to their composition and permissible orders within the phrasal group, the study suggests a methodology for covering a wide variety of meanings and argues for listing not only non-compositional, but also literal metaphorically extended senses. The results of the acquisition are considered in the light of the sense disambiguation problem in computational semantics.