Feeling our way to an analysis of English possessed idioms

Abstract

This paper describes an analysis for possessive idioms in English (e.g. `I twiddle my thumbs' ``I am idle''). The analysis relies on matching at the semantic level, to allow for syntactic variation. It has been implemented in the English Resource Grammar, and tested by parsing a subset of the British National Corpus. In addition to the syntactic analysis, we have linked the idioms to entries in the Princeton Wordnet, to allow for further lexical semantic analysis.