Death and lightness: using a demographic model to find support verbs
Mark Dras, Michael T. Johnson · 1996
Some verbs have a particular kind of binary ambiguity: they can carry their normal, full meaning, or they can be merely acting as a prop for the nominal object. It has been suggested that there is a detectable pattern in the relationship between a verb acting as a prop (a support verb) and the noun it supports. The task this paper undertakes is to develop a model which identifies the support verb for a particular noun, and by extension, when nouns are enumerated, a model which disambiguates a verb with respect to its support status. The paper sets up a basic model as a standard for comparison; it then proposes a more complex model, and gives some results to support the model's validity, comparing it with other similar approaches. 1 Introduction It is well-known that some verbs have a binary ambiguity: consider the sentences Kim took a photograph of Dale and Kim took a painting of Dale. The former can be a paraphrase of Kim photographed Dale while the latter has no such paraphrase. Th...