Individuation and semantic role interpretation in the adpositional domain

In this chapter we discuss the role of Individuation on semantic role interpretation in the adpositional domain. Taking the findings of Aristar (1996, 1997) for the case domain as our starting point we examine whether similar observations can be made for the adpositional domain. On the basis of a corpus study in Dutch we determine whether adpositions show restrictions on the animacy and semantic roles of their complements and whether there is a correlation between the two. Our results suggest that only low-frequency adpositions show typing restrictions whereas we observe much variation with high-frequency ones.