Inheriting Verb Alternations

Inheriting Verb Alternations Adam Kilgarriff Longman Dictionaries Burnt Mill Harlow, Essex CM20 2JE England Abstract The paper shows how the verbal lexicon can be formalised in a way that captures and exploits generalisations about the alterna- tion behaviour of verb classes. An alter- nation is a pattern in which a number of words share the same relationship between • a pair of senses. The alternations captured are ones where the different senses spec- ify different relationships between syntactic complements and semantic arguments, as between bake in "John is baking the cake" and "The cake is baking". The formal lan- guage used is DATR. The lexical entries it builds are as specified in HPSG. The com- plex alternation behaviour shared between families of verbs is elegantly represented in a way that makes generalisations explicit, avoids redundancy, and offers practical ben- efits to computational lexicographers. 1 Introduction The paper shows how the verbal lexicon can be for- malised in a way that captures and exploits gener- alisations about the alternation behaviour of verb classes. An alternation is a pattern in which a num- ber of words share the same relationship between a pair of senses. The kinds of alternations to be cap- tured are ones where the different senses specify dif- ferent relationships between syntactic complements and semantic arguments, as in the relation between bake in "John is baking the cake" and "John is bak- ing", or between melt in "the chocolate melted" and *I would like to thank Gerald Gazdar and Roger Evans for their many valuable comments, and SERC for the grant under which the work wasundertaken. "Mary melted the chocolate" .1 Given that compact- ness and non-redundancy are a desideratum of theo- retical descriptions, the different usage-types for bake and wipe should not require us to introduce different primitives into the lexicon. Moreover, as the alter- nations are shared with other verbs, they should be described at some general node in a hierarchically organised lexicon, and inherited. DATR is a formal language in which the such rela- tionships and generalisations can be simply stated. Much has been written about verb alternations and their syntactic corollaries. Here we do not add to the evidence or construct new theory, but simply formalise other people's accounts: those of [Atkins et al., 1986] and [Levin and Rappoport Ho- vav, 1991]. The first investigates the range of al- ternations between transitive and intransitive forms of verbs. The second, titled Wiping the Slate Clean, explores the relations between meaning and subcate- gorisation possibilities for 'wipe' verbs, 'clean' verbs, and related groupings. The language used is DATR,. a default inheritance formalism designed for lexical representation. We follow Levin and Rappoport Ho- vav in taking a distinct subcategorisation frame as defining a distinct word sense, and also in work- ing with commonsense verb classes such as 'cooking verbs', since classes such as this serve to predict the alternations a verb participates in with some accu- racy. An important constraint is that the lexical entries are of a …

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