PASTRIE : A Corpus of Prepositions Annotated with Supersense Tags in R eddit International E nglish (2020)

Abstract: We present the Prepositions Annotated with Supsersense Tags in Reddit International English (“PASTRIE”) corpus, a new dataset containing manually annotated preposition supersenses of English data from presumed speakers of four L1s: English, French, German, and Spanish. The annotations are comprehensive, covering all preposition types and tokens in the sample. Along with the corpus, we provide analysis of distributional patterns across the included L1s and a discussion of the influence of L1s on L2 preposition choice.

## introduction it is well-established that one's native language ("l1") leaves traces in second language ("l2") word choice and grammar, including subtle aspects of the use of function words such as prepositions-even for highly proficient l2 speakers @xcite @xcite . however, past corpus studies of l2 writing have had no way to control for the meaning of these grammatical items in context on a large scale. in this work, we describe a new corpus, pastrie, 1 consisting of english reddit posts and comments (collectively "documents") that have been manually annotated with preposition supersenses. 2 following @xcite , the annotations also cover possessives, prepositional multiword expressions ("mwes"), and infinitives. 3 examples of annotated sentences appear in (1) and ( 2 ). the annotations are comprehensive, covering all types and tokens of prepositional expressions, totaling 2400 tokens out of the 22.5k token corpus. the documents are drawn from the larger reddit-l2 corpus @xcite , which consists of english reddit data of speakers of many different l1s. our corpus includes english produced by presumed native speakers 4 of english, french, german, and spanish. based on annotators' impressions, the english in the corpus produced by the nonnative speakers is highly fluent and unlike what might be found in learner corpora. this is understandable given that these users are taking it upon themselves to post in an online forum, something early learners are less likely to do. this corpus is not only a new resource for exploring preposition supersenses, but it also addresses an understudied niche of broad-coverage semantics for highly proficient non-native data. using a large, unannotated sample of the reddit-l2 corpus as well as our semantically-annotated subcorpus, we conduct a preliminary investigation of preposition use among english speakers of different l1 backgrounds, extending @xcite analysis of l2 lexical choice. we will release the corpus to facilitate further study of such phenomena. snacs categorizes the use of adpositions and case markers, including english possessives, into 50 coarse-grained supersense classes. each adposition token is annotated as a contrual construction with two of these supersenses @xcite . a construal includes a scene role and a function, where the former expresses the adposition's meaning in context and the latter denotes its lexical meaning. an example of construal is shown in (3), a sentence from our corpus. 6 in context, the possessive my expresses that the speaker is a member of an organization (the company that employs them), hence a scene role of orgmember; however, the lexical meaning of a grammatical possessive when not indicating possession expresses a looser relationship between entities, corresponding to the function gestalt. scene role and function are drawn from the same inventory of supersenses and are often identical. in the pastrie corpus, 72% of annotation targets have the same scene role and function. ## conclusion with data drawn from the reddit-l2 corpus @xcite , we created pastrie, a new corpus of preposition supersense annotations that is publicly available. this corpus adds to existing resources with preposition supersenses and includes annotations of native english data and data produced by l1 speakers of french, german, and spanish. we demonstrated the applicability of snacs and the construal analysis to l2 english. we presented detailed discussion of the annotation process, general corpus statistics, and an analysis of usage phenomena across the l1s, including variations between speakers of different l1 backgrounds. future work may consider a wider variety of l1s than the typologically similar and closely genetically related languages examined in this work. computational applications of pastrie in natural language understanding (nlu) of non-native english merit further investigation. finally, corpus-based research such as in this paper can be used to empirically investigate theories of language acquisition.