We describe an approach to large-scale construction of a semantic lexicon for Chinese verbs. We leverage off of three existing resources— a classification of English verbs called EVCA (English Verbs Classes and Alternations) (Levin, 1993), a Chinese conceptual database called HowNet (Zhendong, 1988c; Zhendong, 1988b; Zhendong, 1988a) (http://www.how-net.com), and a large machine-readable dictio...

This paper introduces a novel unsupervised approach to semantic role induction that uses a generative Bayesian model. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first model that jointly clusters syntactic verbs arguments into semantic roles, and also creates verbs classes according to the syntactic frames accepted by the verbs. The model is evaluated on French and English, outperforming, in both c...

The traditional view holds that English main verbs do not move to any of the inflectional heads AgrS, Tns or AgrO. Recently, it has been claimed that while English main verbs cannot move to the highest inflectional head (i.e. AgrS), they may move to an intermediate inflectional head such as AgrO or Tns (cf. section 2). In earlier work, I have argued that all verb movement to inflectional heads ...

We studied a special case of the translation of English verbs in verb-object pairs. Researchers have studied the effects of the linguistic information of the verbs being translated, and many have reported how considering the objects of the verbs will facilitate the quality of translation. In this study, we took an extreme approach assuming the availability of the Chinese translation of the Engl...

During semi-automatic translation of Princeton English WordNet (PWN) into Korean verbs, we noticed that the verbs of accusativity/inaccusativity alternation in English were mapped to two or more Korean verbs of different morpho-syntactic features and thus different senses. These mismatches in mapping show the need for reconstructing the lexical semantic structure of PWN for Korean verb wordnet,...

During the Root Infinitive (RI) stage children produce both stative and eventive finite verbs, but their non-finite verbs are restricted to eventive predicates (Hoekstra & Hyams, 1998; Wijnen, 1997). This Eventivity Constraint (EC) holds cross-linguistically – for RIs in Dutch, German, French, and Russian, ‘bare perfectives’ in Greek, bare participles (participles without an auxiliary) in Itali...

In acquiring language, children must learn to appropriately place the different participants of an event (e.g., causal agent, affected entity) into the correct syntactic positions (e.g., subject, object) so that listeners will know who did what to whom. While many of these mappings can be characterized by broad generalizations, both within and across languages (e.g., semantic agents tend to be ...

1.1 General introduction One of the most challenging areas for infants acquiring English as their native language are multi-word verbs: There many different kinds of such verbs – e.g., prepositional verbs, phrasal verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1985) terminology – and they come with different kinds of semantics and sy...

A hallmark of the English verb lexicon is the availability of multiple argument realization options for many English verbs. Studies of the English verb lexicon have drawn attention to one facet of this phenomenon: the availability of a range of object alternations (Levin 1993)—alternate realizations of the VP-internal arguments of apparently triadic verbs. One of the best-known of these alterna...

In this study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish SPEECH FRAMING EXPRESSIONS (SFEs). The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as representatives of Germanic and Romance languages respectively in order to determine what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech, wh...