The Representation of German Prepositional Verbs in a Semantically Based Computer Lexicon
Rainer Osswald, Hermann Helbig, Sven Hartrumpf · 2006
We describe the treatment of verbs with prepositional complements in HaGenLex, a semantically based computer lexicon for German.Prepositional verbs such as bestehen auf ('insist on') subcategorize for a prepositional phrase where the preposition usually has no independent meaning of its own.The lexical semantic information in HaGenLex is specified by means of MultiNet, a full-fledged knowledge representation formalism, which proves to be particularly useful for representing the semantics of verbs with prepositional complements.We indicate how the semantic representation in HaGenLex can be used to define semantic classes of prepositional verbs and briefly discuss the relation of these classes to Levin's verb classes.Moreover, we present first results on the automatic identification of prepositional verbs by corpus-based methods.