Rainer Osswald - Toward a Conceptual Representation of Verb Meanings

Despite the considerable amount of work in lexical semantics focusing on specific phenomena on the one hand and the growing impetus towards building large lexical-semantic resources on the other, the proper method and level of representing verb meanings seems to be still an open issue. In addition to being viable on a large scale, the ideal representation should be sufficiently flexible and fine-grained to serve as an explanatory basis for many if not all compositional phenomena. Moreover, the representation should provide a well-defined interface for theories of argument realization.
   In my talk I will argue for a representation of verb meanings based on an expressive frame formalism that allows embedded subframes and relational constraints between frame components. I will motivate this choice by several examples of adverbial modification where the correct interpretation involves conceptual entities that remain syntagmatically implicit. One such example is given by verbs of implicit creation such as wrap or injure where the created entity cannot be expressed syntagmatically with the verb but can nevertheless be characterized by an adverbial. Other examples are provided by adverbials sensitive to the aspectual class of the verb. The proposed frame formalism supports the transparent representation of all conceptual entities participating in an event as well as of the interrelations between these elements and the constraints on them. Finally, using frames with possibly embedded subframes also allows one to capture the representations of standard lexical decomposition approaches, which play a prominent role in many theories of argument realization.
   I will conclude my talk with an outline, exemplified for the German language, of how to proceed in order to build a frame-based conceptual hierarchy for verb meanings on a large scale that satisfies the above-mentioned desiderata and covers a broad range of verb classes. I will also briefly touch more technical issues connected with such a project such as a suitable data format and software support.