scholarly journals English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation

Language ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Carol Tenny ◽  
Beth Levin
Author(s):  
Collin F. Baker ◽  
Josef Ruppenhofer

The classification of verbs in Levin's (1993) English Verb Classes and Alternations: A preliminary Investigation, on the basis of both intuitive semantic grouping and their participation in valence alternations, is often used by the NLP community as evidence of the semantic similarity of verbs (Jing & McKeown 1998; Lapata & Brew 1999; Kohl et al. 1998). In this paper, we compare the Levin classification with the work of the FrameNet project (Fillmore & Baker 2001), where words (not just verbs) are grouped according to the conceptual structures (frames) that underlie them and their combinatorial patterns are inductively derived from corpus evidence. This means that verbs grouped together in FrameNet (FN) might be semantically similar but have different (or no) alternations, and that verbs which share the same alternation might be represented in two different semantic frames.


Author(s):  
Kamilah Zainuddin ◽  
Noor Asmaa' Hussein

Levin (1993) argues that the behaviour of verbs is determined by word meaning which is directly linked to the expression and interpretation of its argument. Based on this statement, Levin classified verbs into 48 classes and VerbNet, an English verb lexicon was created based on the extension of Levin’s taxonomy of verb classification (VC). Therefore, this study presents the classification of the updated English verbs of 2016 to 2018 in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to examine the relevance of Levin’s VC and VerbNet in the recently added repertoire of verbs. In Addition, the study seeks to find out the new verb classes introduced in this study. This study uses a mixed-method to identify and classify the verbs. To conclude, this study found that both classifications were applicable and relevant in 14 new main verb classes introduced to classify the verbs that did not belong to Levin’s VC and VerbNet. Hence, this contributes to the body of knowledge as the newly introduced verb classes could be used based on the given semantic and syntactic conditions.


Author(s):  
Ana Elvira Ojanguren López

The aim of this article is to determine if the Old English verbs bewerian, forbēodan, foresacan, forwiernan, stīeran and tōcweþān constitute a unified class of prohibition. The theoretical model is provided by the framework of verb classes and alternations, as well as by Role and Reference Grammar. Class membership requires not only similar meaning components but also shared grammatical behaviour. While bewerian, forbēodan and forwyrnan are found in three syntactic configurations, and in the Nominalisation and Undergoer alternations, foresacan, stīeran and tōcweþān occur in one syntactic configuration only and do not take part in these alternations. The main conclusion of this article is that these verbs do not show a similar grammatical behaviour and, therefore, cannot be said to represent a consistent verbal class.Keywords: Old English; verb classes; alternations; Role and Reference Grammar


Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.18 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Glushko

The article focuses on corpus quantitative investigation of English diachronic morphology with respect to irregularregular verb classes. General tendencies of the evolution of English verb paradigm are analyzed. Three groups of English verbs have been observed: irregular and regular ones plus goup of verbs on the stage of transition from irregular category into regular one, i.e. possessing both types of conjugation forms. A considerable amount of e-texts has been processed and correspondence of these three verb classes has been revealed. The results reveal existence of certain correlation between the frequency dynamics of the verb and its belonging to irregular or regular conjugation paradigm.


1997 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-90
Author(s):  
Bolette Sanford Pederson

Danish motion verbs provide a good candidate for testing the hypothesis of semantic determination on Danish, a hypothesis most recently discussed by Levin (1993) in her description of English verb classes and alternations. A set of core meaning components for motion verbs is identified and a taxonomy of Danish motion verbs is produced. With the basic assumption that a word's meaning determines its syntactic potential, this paper gives an account of the syntactic alternations that Danish motion verbs can undergo, and exposes a more or less transparent relation between their syntax and semantics.


2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIANGUO LI ◽  
CHRIS BREW

AbstractLapata and Brew (Computational Linguistics, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 295–313) (hereafter LB04) obtain from untagged texts a statistical prior model that is able to generate class preferences for ambiguous Lewin (English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, 1993, University of Chicago Press) verbs (hereafter Levin). They also show that their informative priors, incorporated into a Naive Bayes classifier deduced from hand-tagged data (HTD), can aid in verb class disambiguation. We re-analyse LB04's prior model and show that a single factor (the joint probability of class and frame) determines the predominant class for a particular verb in a particular frame. This means that the prior model cannot be sensitive to fine-grained lexical distinctions between different individual verbs falling in the same class.We replicate LB04's supervised disambiguation experiments on large-scale data, using deep parsers rather than the shallow parser of LB04. In addition, we introduce a method for training our classifier without using HTD. This relies on knowledge of Levin class memberships to move information from unambiguous to ambiguous instances of each class. We regard this system as unsupervised because it does not rely on human annotation of individual verb instances. Although our unsupervised verb class disambiguator does not match the performance of the ones that make use of HTD, it consistently outperforms the random baseline model. Our experiments also demonstrate that the informative priors derived from untagged texts help improve the performance of the classifier trained on untagged data.


Author(s):  
R.P. Apkarian ◽  
J.S. Sanfilippo

The synthetic androgen danazol, is an isoxazol derivative of ethisterone. It is utilized in the treatment of endometriosis, fibrocystic breast disease, and has a potential use as a contraceptive. A study was designed to evaluate the ultrastructural changes associated with danazol therapy in a rat model. The preliminary investigation of the distal segment of the rat uterine horn was undertaken as part of a larger study intended to elucidate the effects of danazol on the female reproductive tract.Cross-sections (2-3 mm in length) of the distal segment of the uterine horn from sixteen Sprague-Dawley rats were prepared for SEM. Ten rats in estrus served as controls and six danazol treated rats were noted to have alterations of the estrus cycle i.e. a lag in cycle phase or noncycling patterns. Specimens were fixed in 3% glutaraldehyde in 0.05M phosphate buffer containing CaCl2 at pH 7.0-7.4 and chilled to 4°C. After a brief wash in distilled water, specimens were passed through a graded series of ethanol, critical point dryed in CO2 from absolute ethanol, and coated with 6nm Au. Observations were made with an IS1-40 SEM operated at 15kV.


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