1992 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Degrees of Stativity: The Lexical Representation of Verb Aspect

Klavans, Judith L.; Chodorow, Martin

The automatic acquisition of lexical knowledge from large corpora has dealt primarily with coocurrence phenomena, at the expense of inherent lexical features. We present here a methodology for obtaining semantic information on verb aspect by parsing a corpus and automatically applying linguistic tests with a set of structural analysis tools. Once applied, we propose a representation for verb aspect that associates a value with weights for event types. Weights reflect typical verb use, and thus represent a measure of the resistance or ease of coercion in sentential context. The results we report here have been obtained in two ways: by extracting relevant information from the tagged Brown corpus (Francis and Kucera 1982), and by running a parser (McCord 1980, 1990) on the Reader's Digest corpus to extract more accurate information on verb usage in text.