An empirical classification of verbs based on Semantic Types: the case of the 'poison' verbs

摘要

This article proposes a new approach to verb classification based on Semantic Types selected in corpus-based verb patterns. This work draws on Hanks's theory of Norms and Exploitations (Hanks 2013) and applies Corpus Pattern Analysis to a subset of verbs from Levin's 'poison' class, including verbs such as hang and stab. These patterns are taken from the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs, which aims at recording prototypical phraseological patterns for the most frequent verbs of English using the British National Corpus.