We present an approach for opinion role induction for verbal predicates. Our model rests on the assumption that opinion verbs can be divided into three different types where each type is associated with a characteristic mapping between semantic roles and opinion holders and targets. In several experiments, we demonstrate the relevance of those three categories for the task. We show that verbs c...

The compositionality of particle verbs is a matter of dispute. The following paper will show that the semantics of German particle verbs is the combination of verb semantics and particle semantics. For this purpose, the verb particle an was analyzed and turned out to be highly ambiguous. Still, it can be systematically reconstructed. The different meanings resulting out of this ambiguity were g...

This article discusses the nature of Estonian aspect and case, proposing an analysis of Estonian verbal aspect, aspectual case, and clausal aspect. The focus is on the interaction of transitive telic verbs (write, win) and aspectual case at the level of the functional structure. The main discussion concerns the relationships between aspect and the object case alternation. The data set comprises...

Work on ontologies and lexical semantics has long been aware of different subsumption relations among concepts that are lexically encoded as nouns (Gangemi et al. 2001, 2002; Guarino and Welty 2001). An important distinction is that between TYPES and ROLES (Guarino and Welty 2002; Pustejovsky 1995). For example, poodle and Welsh corgi are TYPES of dog, while pet, hunting dog, guard dog, and wor...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

In this paper we give an analysis of Murrinh-Patha verbs as morphological complex predicates. We argue that the different parts of the complex predicate provide information for different layers of the argument structure; more precisely, that classifier stems determine the number of arguments a verbal complex takes while lexical stems contribute thematic information. We further show how the argu...

This paper investigates novel evidence from Russian Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VVPE), and argues for its use as a probe into the syntactic structure of morphophonologically inseparable but morphosyntactically complex verbs. The first step is to distinguish internal argument drop from VVPE, because they appear identical on the surface. I present novel evidence that Russian internal arg...