Towards building a database of Croatian prepositions – theoretical and practical prerequisites

This study presents the first steps undertaken in building a database of Croatian prepositions, a novel computational resource for Croatian aimed at describing relevant syntactic and semantic features of prepositions based on Croatian corpus data. Extant studies and approaches to Croatian prepositions, as well as other computational resources available, e.g., valency dictionaries, are examined with regard to their (dis)advantages in building the preposition database. Furthermore, this study focuses on proposing an annotation schema based on a preliminary investigation of 2000 corpus examples of 50 prepositions. It presents a preposition sense inventory built with the aim to a) unify sense descriptions currently dispersed across various case studies of Croatian prepositions, b) represent preposition senses in a manner that captures both specificities of prepositional polysemy and their (para)synonymy relations. Other language phenomena, such as complex constructions, are discussed as interacting with prepositional senses in various ways, thus illustrating the need for various levels of syntactic and semantic annotation of prepositional uses. Therefore, based on previous usage-based investigations of Croatian and the current corpus-based analysis of prepositions, the study proposes a roadmap for prepositional data annotation.