This paper describes the implementation of a system that automatically learns selectional restrictions for individual senses of polysemous verbs from subject-object relationships. The selectional restrictions are inferred from an adaptation of decision tree induction, and are bound to the syntactic relations that realize them as part of a move toward automated construction of verb predicates.

This paper discusses postverbal PPs in Mandarin Chinese and proposes that the constraints on postverbal PPs are not syntactic per se, but prosodic in character. It is shown that the NSR (Nuclear Stress Rule), formulated in terms of government, is responsible for the grammaticality of postverbal PPs in Mandarin Chinese. Introduction Postverbal PPs in Mandarin have been investigated by Chao (1968...

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with processing light verb constructions such as "give a kiss". These constructions consist of a semantically underspecified light verb ("give") and an event nominal that contributes most of the meaning and also activates an argument structure of its own ("kiss"). This creates a mismatch between the ...

Hand-built verb clusters such as the widely used Levin classes (Levin, 1993) have proved useful, but have limited coverage. Verb classes automatically induced from corpus data such as those from VerbKB (Wijaya, 2016), on the other hand, can give clusters with much larger coverage, and can be adapted to specific corpora such as Twitter. We present a method for clustering the outputs of VerbKB: v...

1. Introduction Any theory of how language is internally organized and how it interacts with other mental capacities must address the fundamental question of how syntactic and lexico-semantic information interact at one central linguistic compositional level, the sentence level. With this general objective in mind, we examine “ " light-verbs” " , so called because the main thrust of the semanti...