Positional verbs: derivation semantics and functioning

Positional Verbs in Nen

In this paper, I lay out the workings of the rather unusual system of positional verbs found in Nen, a language of the Morehead-Maro family in Morehead district, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Nen is unusual in its lexicalization patterns: it has very few verbs that are intransitive, with most verbs that tend to be intransitive cross-linguistically realized as morphologically middle verbs,...

Semantics of motion verbs

Motion verbs in languages convey the meanings of spatiotemporal change. Ontologies that deal with spatial actions can benefit from the study of such verbs and their usage. This paper explores semantic components of motion related verbs and verb complexes. Such semantics components assume certain spatial primitives and intuitions which need to be considered in the context of ontologies derived f...

Intensional verbs in event semantics

ly, ‘as such’, following ‘Superman’ in ( 2 a), that is, if ( 2 a) means ( 3 ) Lois believes that Superman, as such, can fly. Here ‘such’ refers not to the name ‘Superman’, but by a kind of deferred ostension, through the name to something associated with it. Of course, there is no need to deny that ( 2 a) can also be understood in a way that legitimizes substitution, or in the standard jargon, ...

Semantics of Verbs within GermaNet and EuroWordNet

Visual Semantics and Ontology of Eventive Verbs

Various English verb classifications have been analyzed in terms of their syntactic and semantic properties, and conceptual components, such as syntactic valency, lexical semantics, and semantic/syntactic correlations. Here the visual semantics of verbs, particularly their visual roles, somatotopic effectors, and level-of-detail, is studied. We introduce the notion of visual valency and use it ...