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

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/).