Verbs Taking Clausal and Non-Finite Arguments as Signals of Modality - Revisiting the Issue of Meaning Grounded in Syntax

TL;DR

This paper revisits Levin's theory by classifying over 600 German verbs with clausal and non-finite arguments, linking their semantic classes to established lexicons to better understand verb meaning grounded in syntax.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale classification of German verbs based on syntax and links these classes to multiple semantic lexicons for comprehensive analysis.

Findings

Semantic classes are effectively inferred from syntactic data.

The classification aligns well with existing lexicons like GermaNet, VerbNet, and FrameNet.

The approach enhances understanding of the connection between syntax and meaning.

Abstract

We revisit Levin's theory about the correspondence of verb meaning and syntax and infer semantic classes from a large syntactic classification of more than 600 German verbs taking clausal and non-finite arguments. Grasping the meaning components of Levin-classes is known to be hard. We address this challenge by setting up a multi-perspective semantic characterization of the inferred classes. To this end, we link the inferred classes and their English translation to independently constructed semantic classes in three different lexicons - the German wordnet GermaNet, VerbNet and FrameNet - and perform a detailed analysis and evaluation of the resulting German-English classification (available at www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/modality-verbclasses/).