The semantics of verbs

THE SEMANTICS OF VERBS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………..3
CHAPTER I. DESCRIPTION OF DIFFERENT APPROACHES……………6
1.1. Syntactic alternations and verb semantic classes…………………………...6
1.2. Construction of verb semantic classes………………………………………10
Conclusion for chapter I…………………………………………………………17
CHAPTER II. SEMANTICS OF THE VERB AND SEMANTICS OF THE CONSTRUCTION………………………………………………………………18
2.1. Comparisons between approaches…………………………………………25
2.2. Relations with other areas of lexical semantics…………………………….26
Conclusion for chapter II………………………………………………………..39
CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………….40
USED LITERATURE …………………………………………………………..41




INTRODUCTION
The following approaches to building verb semantic classes are outlined in this section: verb classes based on syntactic behaviour (alternations), and verb classes formed from semantic criteria such as thematic roles and elements of Lexical Conceptual Structure. Classifications related to WordNet criteria are discussed in the section devoted to WordNet. Each of these approaches contribute to a different form of classification, whose usefulness and ease of formation will be evaluated.
The main practical aim of verb semantic classifications is to contribute to structure the lexicon and to allow for a better organized, more homogeneous, description, of their semantics. From a more formal point of view, the main aims are the identification of meaning components forming the semantics of verbs, the specification of more subtle meaning elements that differentiate closely related verbs and the study of the cooperation between syntax and semantics.
Besides the already discussed categories of the verb, there are some other categories like aspect, order, posteriority, tense and others.
These categories are very often mixed up: most authors consider them within the tense category. To illustrate this we'll view the conception of Henry Sweet.
To H. Sweet (42) there are three tenses in English. "Tense is primarily the grammatical expression of distinctions of time".
Every occurrence, considered from the point of view of time, must be either past (I was here yesterday), present (he is here today), or future (he will be here tomorrow).