Enriching Valency Lexicons with Constructional Analyses

ABSTRACT: One of the main objectives of valency lexicons is to identify predicate argument structures evoked by verbs. The analysis used in these resources heavily rests on lexical semantics and as such provides an accurate description of event structure in cases in which a verb is used in its prototypical sense, such as when the verb kick is used as a force verb in the example He kicked the door . However, this approach to event structure representation proves inadequate for examples in which a verb is used in a non-prototypical sense in which additional event participants are evoked constructionally, such as the use of kick in a transfer event: He kicked him the ball . In this paper, we propose a two-tier representation of event structure in which lexical semantics and the semantics of argument structure constructions are dealt with independently. We present a detailed model of constructional analysis that is compatible with lexically based analyses of event structure used in valency lexicons, such as Propbank, and show that a mapping between lexical and constructional representations provides a more comprehensive understanding of the event semantics when compared to a lexical representation alone.