Syntactic behaviour and semantic kinship of selected Danish verbs

The paper discusses relationships between the syntactic behaviour and meaning of selected verbs, with the focus on exploiting observable syntactic similarities for uncovering of semantic kinship. The investigation is inspired by the demand in language technology for large-scale lexicons that combine morphological, syntactic and semantic descriptions of the lemmas. The development of such a lexical resource is rather demanding, therefore, an enhancement of existing resources with additional information types is a worthwhile task. The computational lexicon for Danish SprogTeknologisk Ordbase (STO) comprises a comprehensive syntactic layer which is assumed to be suitable for enhancement with semantic information. The theoretical background for the current approach is the consensus on obvious relationships between a syntactic behaviour and a particular sense of lemmas, as a surface complementation structure reflects the underlying semantic argument structure. The idea is to test the feasibility of deriving semantic information systematically from the syntactic structures encoded in syntactic patterns.