Verbs and (sub)Event Structure: A Case Study from Italian

In this paper, I try to show the advantages of analyzing events in terms of subevent structure, by taking into consideration the case of a specific class of verbs: transitive and intransitive verbs which obligatorily require the presence of a predicative complement (e.g., English seem, consider). The proposed analysis is exemplified with data from Italian. Two verbs are described in detail: rimanere, ‘remain’ and rendere, ‘make’. It is shown that subevent structure representation is useful for the description of the different uses and meanings of these verbs. This type of description can also be the basis for an accurate treatment in computational semantic lexica.