Abstract

This paper explores verb-attached PPs as adjuncts or parts of verbal frames with the help of a large-scale valency-database generated from the output of a dependency parser. Our investigation is based on more than 240 million words of American and British English. We combine measures of surprise with measures of lexical diversity in order to study fixedness of various types. We also use these measures to explore the cline from verbal complement to adjunct and test statistical measures of surprise as a means of distinguishing complements from adjuncts. We calculate measures of surprise and variability for verb-preposition, verb-object-PP and other combinations in order to identify and locate verbal idioms.