Syntactic Transfer Patterns of German Particle Verbs and their Impact on Lexical Semantics

Proceedings of the Third Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2014), pages 182–192, Dublin, Ireland, August 23-24 2014. Syntactic Transfer Patterns of German Particle Verbs and their Impact on Lexical Semantics Stefan Bott Sabine Schulte im Walde Institut f¨ur Maschinelle Sprachverabeitung Universit¨at Stuttgart Pfaffenwaldring 5b, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany {stefan.bott,schulte}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de Abstract German particle verbs, like anblicken (to gaze at) combine a base verb (blicken) with a particle (an) to form a special kind of Multi Word Expression. Parti- cle verbs may share the semantics of the base verb and the particle to a variable de- gree. However, while syntactic subcate- gorization frames tend to be good predic- tor for the semantics of verbs in general (verbs that are similar in meaning also tend to have similar subcategorization frames and selectional preferences), there are reg- ular changes in subcategorization frames by particle verbs with regard to the corre- sponding base verbs. This paper demon- strates that the syntactic behavior of par- ticle verbs and base verbs together (mod- eling regular changes in subcategorization frames by particle verbs and correspond- ing base verbs) and applying clustering techniques allows us to distinguish parti- cle verb meaning and shows the tight con- nection between transfer patterns and the semantic classes of particle verbs. 1 Introduction In German, particle verbs (PVs), like anblicken in (1), are a highly productive class. PVs present challenges for a both theoretical analysis and their computational treatment. One of the central prob- lems is the prediction of their meaning from their constituent parts: the base verb (BV, e.g. blicken in (1)) and the particle (e.g. an). Many PVs de- rive their meaning from the corresponding BVs – with a varying degree of transparency. It is often This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. Page numbers and proceedings footer are added by the organisers. Licence details: http: //creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ not clear, however, how to interpret the semantics of the particles and their contribution to the mean- ing of the PVs. Since particles never occur iso- lated, without the context of the verb, it is difficult to assign them a lexical semantic entry on their own. Even more, German particles are a notori- ously ambiguous word class. (1) Das The Kind child blickt gazes seine his-acc Mutter mother an. PRT. The child looks at his mother. One way to approximate the meaning of parti- cles is to group together the particle verbs which share the same particle into semantic groups (such as anblicken, anstarren, anschauen ‘to stare/look at’), such that both the meaning of the PV and the meaning of the BV is similar in each group. This allows us to make inferences like ”taking a BV from semantic group α and particle β, we will de- rive a PV from semantic group δ”. Such groups can be established and they represent productive paradigms. Springorum et al. (2013) have shown in a generation experiment setup that subjects are able to associate a meaning to artificially created, previously …

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