Semantic Encoding of Danish Verbs in SIMPLE - Adapting a Verb Framed Model to a Satellite-framed Language

In this paper we give an account of the representation of Danish verbs in the semantic lexicon model, SIMPLE. Danish is a satellite-framed language where prepositions and adverbial particles express what in many other languages form part of the meaning of the verb stem. This aspect of Danish – as well as of the other Scandinavian languages challenges the borderlines of a universal, strictly modular framework which centralises around the governing word classes and their arguments. In particular, we look into the representation of phrasal verbs and we propose a classification into compositional and non-compositional phrasal verbs, respectively, and adopt a so-called split late strategy where non-compositional phrasal verbs are identified only at the semantic level of analysis.