Inheriting Verb Alternations

The paper shows how the verbal lexicon can be formalised in a way that captures and exploits generalisations about the alternation behaviour of verb classes. An alternation is a pattern in which a number of words share the same relationship between • a pair of senses. The alternations captured are ones where the different senses specify different relationships between syntactic complements and semantic arguments, as between bake in "John is baking the cake" and "The cake is baking". The formal language used is DATR. The lexical entries it builds are as specified in HPSG. The complex alternation behaviour shared between families of verbs is elegantly represented in a way that makes generalisations explicit, avoids redundancy, and offers practical benefits to computational lexicographers.