Italian VerbNet: A Construction-based Approach to Italian Verb Classification

Italian VerbNet: A Construction-based Approach to Italian Verb Classification Lucia Busso, Alessandro Lenci CoLingLab, Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, University of Pisa via S. Maria 36, 56126 Pisa, Italy E-mail: lucia.busso90@gmail.com, alessandro.lenci@unipi.it Abstract This paper proposes a new method for Italian verb classification -and a preliminary example of resulting classes- inspired by Levin (1993) and VerbNet (Kipper-Schuler, 2005), yet partially independent from these resources; we achieved such a result by integrating Levin and VerbNet’s models of classification with other theoretic frameworks and resources. The classification is rooted in the constructionist framework (Goldberg, 1995; 2006) and is distribution-based. It is also semantically characterized by a link to FrameNet’ssemanticframesto represent the event expressed by a class. However, the new Italian classes maintain the hierarchic “tree” structure and monotonic nature of VerbNet’s classes, and, where possible, the original names (e.g.: Verbs of Killing, Verbs of Putting, etc.). We therefore propose here a taxonomy compatible with VerbNet but at the same time adapted to Italian syntax and semantics. It also addresses a number of problems intrinsic to the original classifications, such as the role of argument alternations, here regarded simply as epiphenomena, consistently with the constructionist approach. Keywords: verb classification, construction grammar, VerbNet 1. Introduction Verb classification and its implications have been at the center of linguistic research on the syntactic-semantic interface for almost 50 years. In fact, since the pioneer works of Charles Fillmore (Fillmore, 1968, 1970), it has been recognized that verbs that share common semantic features can be grouped on the basis of their regular syntactic patterns of argument realizations. Fillmore suggested that a verb syntactic behavior (i.e., its argument realization) and lexical semantics are linked, and that verbs tend to group accordingly to these variables. In Fillmore (1970), the author proposed the famous distinction between break and hit, which do not show similar syntactic behavior even though they share a intuitive and basic meaning. For instance, only break allows for the inchoative alternation: (1) a. The stick broke. b. *The tree hit. [Fillmore, 1970: 126-128] The two verbs actually represent larger classes that include other similar verbs that show the same syntactic realizations: a. Break verbs: bend, fold, shatter, crack… b. Hit verbs: slap, strike, bump, stroke... [Fillmore, 1970: 130] A verb class is thus intended as a homogenous group of verbs, defined in terms of shared meaning components and similar syntactic behavior, or more specifically a set of “semantically related verbs sharing a range of linguistic properties, such as the possible realizations of their arguments and the particular interpretation associated with each possible argument realization.” (Levin, 2013:1). Understanding how verbs can be grouped and what is precisely the status of the resultant verb classes has been a major goal of many scholars operating in various and different research fields and from different approaches: lexical semantics, computational linguistics, cognitive sciences etc.(see among others Pinker, 1989; Jackendoff, 1990; Levin, 1993; Dorr, 1997; Dang et al., 1998; Merlo and Stevenson, 2001). A very large literature on verb classification has appeared since …

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