Towards a Representation of Verbal Semantics – An Approach Based on Near-Synonyms

In this paper we propose using the distributional differences in the syntactic patterns of near-synonyms to deduce the relevant components of verb meaning. Our method involves determining the distributional differences in syntactic patterns, deducing the semantic features from the syntactic phenomena, and testing the semantic features in new syntactic frames. We determine the distributional differences in syntactic patterns through the following five steps: First, we search for all instances of the verb in the corpus. Second, we classify each of these instances into its type of syntactic function. Third, we classify each of these instances into its argument structure type. Fourth, we determine the aspectual type that is associated with each verb. Lastly, we determine each verb's sentential type. Once the distributional differences have been determined, then the relevant semantic features are postulated. Our goal is to tease out the lexical semantic features as the explanation, and as the motivation of the syntactic contrasts.