Studienarbeit/Diplomarbeit: Verb-subcategorizing verbs and covert events
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This project aims at the extraction of verbs for English and German
which have a NP/VP alternation, such as begin the newspaper / begin
reading the newspaper. Such verbs are said to sub-categorize for
events [Pustejovsky, 1995], and are of some interest because, when the
object position is filled by an entity-denoting object, they seem to
require the recovery of covert events (CE). Such construction can be
paraphrases by making the CE explicit (explicit paraphrase):


example             | paraphrase           | agentive q. |  telic q.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
begin the newspaper | begin reading the n. |  writing    |  reading
enjoy the family    | enjoy spending time  |             |
                      with the family      |   ?         |    ?
   
Briscoe et al. [1990] extracted ”verbs coded to take both NP and
progressive or infinitive VP complements” and selected 24 predicates
”capable of exhibiting logical metonymies parallel to that of enjoy”
(begin, enjoy, finish, miss, prefer, regret, start). Verspoor [1997]
studied begin, its variant begin on and finish.

The main question here is: How can we build a list of verbs showing
this behavior? How can they be defined in operational terms? Are
different criteria necessary for different languages, e.g.  English
and German?

This project is suitable either as a Studienarbeit or as a
Diplomarbeit. Prerequisites are familiarity with corpus linguistics
methods and programming skills. The project will be supervised by
Alessandra Zarcone and Sebastian Pado; the working language will be
(mostly) English.

The tasks for this project are:
   1. extraction of sub-categorization frames from 
      deWac / ukWac corpus;
   2. selection of verbs showing the NP/VP alternance;
   3. analysis of the selected verbs, in order to study 
      which of them give rise to CE interpretations;
   4. operational definition of CE constructions;
   5. descriptive statistics among sub-categorizationation frames;
   6. study of differences between criteria for English and 
      German CE constructions.
          
                                    
References
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T. Briscoe, A. Copestake, and B. Boguraev. Enjoy the paper: lexical
   semantics via lexicology. In Proceedings of the 13th International
   Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-90), pages 42–47,
   Helsinki, Finland, 1990.
J. Pustejovsky. The Generative Lexicon. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1995.
C. M. Verspoor. Contextually-Dependent Lexical Semantics. PhD thesis,
   University of Edinburgh, 1997.