La interacció entre la sintaxi i la semàntica en el comportament verbal (1998)

Supervisor: Jaume Tió

This thesis deals with a theme, the lexical component, that is located in a central place between the most current linguistic theories, since it has been verified that most of the generalisations which can be done about languages have a lexical dimension. From the computational point of view, the lexicon also constitutes a critical enclave of the systems of natural language processing, which now deal with natural languages without any type of restriction. It is the lexicon that holds up the integration of morphological, syntactical and semantic components. The objective of this work is to define a model of lexical entry for verbs which reports on syntactic-semantic aspects that are relevant when defining and predicting the behaviour of these predicates and that will be useful both for the linguistic theory and for the computerised treatment of language. To achieve this, a revision is carried out, both of the verbal entries in common use dictionaries and of the items found in computational lexicons and in linguistic theories. Moreover, starting from a study of 1.000 Catalan verbs, a proposal of a model of verbal entry is made which pretends to be valid for the three areas and which is based on the concept of class, following Levin 1993. In this thesis two verbal classes are defined: that of predicates of change and that of predicates of trajectory.