Prepositions, postpositions and other adpositions have received a considerable amount of interest in recent years. Researchers from linguistics, artificial intelligence and psycholinguistics have examined spatial and temporal aspects of prepositions, their cross-linguistic differences, monolingual and cross-linguistic contrasts, the role of prepositions in syntactic alternations and their semantics in situated dialog. In languages like English and German, phrasal verbs have also been the subject of considerable research, ranging from the development of techniques for their automatic extraction from corpora to methods for determining their semantics. In other languages, like Romance languages or Hindi, the focus has been either on the incorporation of the preposition or its inclusion in the prepositional phrase. All these configurations are important both semantically and syntactically in natural language understanding and processing.

This workshop builds on the success of three previous workshops on prepositions (held in Toulouse, 2003, Colchester, 2005 and Trento, 2006) in providing a forum for researchers to present their current work on these areas. The aim of these workshops has been to bring together researchers from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the syntax, semantics, description, representation and cross-linguistic aspects of prepositions in order to promote collaboration.