A Treebank-based Investigation of IPP-triggering Verbs in Dutch

quality, which applies to the majority of the glosses, is used to indicate that
there is no agreement between the two parsers that have been used to parse
the input definition, and that there has been no manual checking of the output.
"Gold" quality means manual checking has been performed, and "silver"
quality indicates that there has been no manual checking but the two parsers
agree in their representation. The importance given to the agreement between
the two constituency parsers, is due to the fact that LFs are a mapping on
syntactic constituency representation.
LF from glosses is represented in different manner according to lexical
category, adjective, verb, noun and adverb: each one is associated to a
predicate but with some differences. As far as verbs are concerned we have
the following picture:
For each synset, a variable 'e1' is associated to the first term that represents it,
to indicate the eventuality of the action/state/event of the verb meaning; the
subject is associated invariably to 'x1' and the object to 'x2'. The second
argument may be fictitious in case of intransitive verbs.
recognize:VB(e1, x1, x2) -> show:VB(e1, x1, x5) approval:NN(x3) or:CC(x5,
x3, x4) appreciation:NN(x4) of:IN(x5, x2)
In this case all variables are bound to some argument position and are
associated to some linguistic element.
In the case of ditransitive verbs the LF representation of the event is
verb(e1,x1,x2,x3), as in, professor gives students the grades: professor(x1 )
give( e1, x1, x2, x3 ) grade(x2) student (x3), however this representation is not
the rule. This issue constitutes by itself a thorny problem even at a theoretical
level (but see Pustejovsky 1991;2000), so I will start by introducing the topic
and then I will delve into the way in which it has been treated in XWN. There
are at least four different types of three-place predicates (hence 3PPs):
a. PUT, John put the book on the table
b. STRIP, John strips capital gains from the bill
c. CONSIDER, John considers Mary silly
d. CAUSE, John caused the car to stop
These examples could be multiplied with other logically and lexically similar
verbs and I will add one more example in the logical forms below. One also
needs to stress the fact that example c. is a case of secondary predication
which is semantically identical to "John painted the house black", but
lexically totally different. The verb PAINT is just a transitive verb, which can
at times receive secondary predication, though necessarily semantically viable,
like a colour "BLACK". The verb CONSIDER is lexically speaking, a 3-place
predicate, i.e. a special type of transitive verb. Special treatment is required
also for "perception verbs" like SEE and others that we discuss in detail below.
What is important now, is to highlight the lexical structures of each case: Case
A. has a Subject, an Object and an Oblique which is an Oblique complement
and is Obligatory. Differently from Case B. where the verb STRIP has an
Oblique which is an Optional argument. Case A. could also be exemplified by
verbs like GIVE, TELL, PROMISE etc. – as for instance in “John gave Mary
a book” - which can exhibit a double object construction in addition to the
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