The Representation of German Prepositional Verbs in a Semantically Based Computer Lexicon

AbstractWe describe the treatment of verbs with prepositional complements inHaGenLex, a semantically based computer lexicon for German.Prepositional verbs such as “bestehen auf” (insist on) subcategorize for a prepositional phrase where the preposition usually has no independent meaning of its own. The lexical semantic information inHaGenLex is specified by means of MultiNet, a full-fledged knowledge representation formalism, which proves to be particularly useful for representing the semantics of verbs with prepositional complements. We indicate how the semantic representation in HaGenLex can be used to define semantic classes of prepositional verbs and briefly discuss the relation of these classes to Levin's verb classes. Moreover, wepresent first results on the automatic identification of prepositionalverbs by corpus-based methods.