Interpretable dimensions support an effect of agentivity and telicity on split intransitivity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interpretable semantic dimensions related to agentivity and telicity influence the syntactic classification of intransitive verbs, providing evidence that these dimensions support traditional syntactic distinctions.

Contribution

The study introduces interpretable dimensions derived from seed words to better understand the semantic factors influencing intransitive verb syntax, challenging prior findings based solely on human ratings.

Findings

Supports the link between agentivity/telicity and unergativity/unaccusativity

Demonstrates the usefulness of interpretable dimensions in semantic analysis

Shows that combining interpretable dimensions with human judgments yields valuable insights

Abstract

Intransitive verbs fall into two different syntactic classes, unergatives and unaccusatives. It has long been argued that verbs describing an agentive action are more likely to appear in an unergative syntax, and those describing a telic event to appear in an unaccusative syntax. However, recent work by Kim et al. (2024) found that human ratings for agentivity and telicity were a poor predictor of the syntactic behavior of intransitives. Here we revisit this question using interpretable dimensions, computed from seed words on opposite poles of the agentive and telic scales. Our findings support the link between unergativity/unaccusativity and agentivity/telicity, and demonstrate that using interpretable dimensions in conjunction with human judgments can offer valuable evidence for semantic properties that are not easily evaluated in rating tasks.