Understanding Verbs based on Overlapping Verbs Senses

Natural language can be easily understood by everyone irrespective of their differences in age or region or qualification. The existence of a conceptual base that underlies all natural languages is an accepted claim as pointed out by Schank in his Conceptual Dependency (CD) theory. Inspired by the CD theory and theories in Indian grammatical tradition, we propose a new set of meaning primitives in this paper. We claim that this new set of primitives captures the meaning inherent in verbs and help in forming an inter-lingual and computable ontological classification of verbs. We have identified seven primitive overlapping verb senses which substantiate our claim. The percentage of coverage of these primitives is 100% for all verbs in Sanskrit and Hindi and 3750 verbs in English.