Identifying Syntactically Relevant Units of Meaning

Syntax = Semantics?
• Not all verbal syntax is indicative of a verb’s
lexical semantic properties
• Syntactic classification gives only a limited
picture of underlying semantics
• Levin’s (1993) verb classes do not exhibit
uniform meaning, cf. break vs. split verbs:
• “It is possible that additional verbs from these
other classes might qualify as split verbs.” (1993:
167)
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