Semantics: The meaning of Verbs (Do 10-12)

Goals: Verbs are the central categories of many approaches to syntax and semantics, and the course aims to study the reasons for this, mainly using the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, but also taking ideas and examples from other sources.

Addressees: Students of English, general and computational linguistics, Hauptstudium.

Contents:

• Verb categories: Auxiliary, Main.
• Verb subcategories: complementation.
• Representing verbs: feature structures.
• Lexical hierarchies: verb types.
• (De-)verbal nouns: what is verby about some nouns?
• Computer support 1: corpora and concordances.
• Computer support 2: the thesaurus as a computational hyperlexicon.

Methods:

• Projects with library/WWW research: group reports.
• Construction of `hyperlexicon' samples of verbs and their properties.
• Electronic publishing of lexicon hypertexts.
• Qualification by term paper (formal details on Web page for classes).

Reading: See the reserved bookshelf (Semesterapparat), and particularly the following:

Allwood, J., L.-G. Andersson, Ö. Dahl (1977). Logic in Linguistics. Cambridge: C.U.P.

Levin, B. (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago: Chicago U.P.

Pollard, C. & I. A. Sag (1987). Information-based Syntax and Semantics I: Fundamentals. Stanford: CSLI.

Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

WWW:
(Verb Semantics)