Verb interpretation for basic action types: annotation, ontology induction and creation of prototypical scenes

In the last 20 years dictionaries and lexicographic resources such as WordNet have started to be enriched with multimodal content. Short videos depicting basic actions support the user\u27s need (especially in second language acquisition) to fully understand the range of applicability of verbs. The IMAGACT project has among its results a repository of action verbs ontologically organised around prototypical action scenes in the form of both video recordings and 3D animations. The creation of the IMAGACT ontology, which consists in deriving action types from corpus instances of action verbs, intra and cross linguistically validating them and producing the prototypical scenes thereof, is the preliminary step for the creation of a resouce that users can browse by verb, learning how to match different action prototypes with the correct verbs in the target language. The mapping of IMAGACT types onto WordNet synsets allows for a mutual enrichment of both resources

Grounding Abstract Concepts in Action

Sensory-motor information is linguistically encoded by action verbs. Such verbs are not only used to express action concepts and events, but they are also pervasively exploited in the linguistic representation of abstract concepts and figurative meanings. In the light of several theoretical approaches (i.e., Embodied Theories, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Image Schema Theory), this paper analyzes the mechanisms that enable action verbs to acquire abstract meanings and that motivate the symmetries (or asymmetries) in the semantic variations of locally equivalent verbs (e.g., premere and spingere; Eng., to press and to push). The research is carried out within the IMAGACT framework and focuses on a set of four Italian action verbs encoding force (i.e., premere, spingere, tirare, and trascinare; Eng., to press, to push, to pull, and to drag). The results confirm that metaphorical extensions of action verbs are constrained by the image schemas involved in the core meaning of the verbs. Additionally, the paper shows that these image schemas are responsible for the asymmetries in the metaphorical variation of action verbs pertaining to the same semantic class (i.e., force)

Just a Matter of ‘Manner’? Modeling Action Verb Semantics in an Inter-Linguistic Perspective

Action vebs are important testing ground for the study of lexical encoding of the ‘manner’ feature. In this respect, the opposition between ‘manner’ and ‘result’ verbs has definitely become one of the central nodes to describe different ways to lexicalize the meaning components. Nonetheless, a more integrated way to conceive cognitive and semantic conceptualization of actions can lead to highlighting a wider range of lexicalization strategies. The inter-linguistic comparison of these strategies can make a major contribution to this end. In this paper, we will mostly focus on Chinese, English and Italian, and we will analyze the meaning components of different seriees of verbs from the semantic fields of ‘breaking’, ‘cutting’, ‘cooking’, ‘killing’, and ‘motion’. In order to perform such an analysis, we assumed the framework adopted by the IMAGACT Ontology, a multilingual database linking visually represented action concepts and lexical entries. The results lead to reconsidering the weight of some of the traditional categories used to describe action verb sematics. More specifically, we will see that ‘manner’ and ‘result’ features can interact in different and complex ways, and that other components, such as the ‘goal’ of the action, can be useful to descibe the meaning of verbs encoding neither ‘manner’ nor ‘result’

Der Ausdruck von Aktionen im Deutschen und Italienischen: Recherchen zur Lexikalisierungsstrategie mit IMAGACT

The article considers contrastive linguistics as a discipline that interacts closely with its intralinguistic and applied neighbouring disciplines. Within this framework, the online ontology IMAGACT presents an instrument that allows to contrast how languages lexicalize concrete actions (movements, modification of objects, setting relations among objects, etc.) in their verbs. German and Italian, the language pair considered here, differ typologically in their lexicalization strategies, which leads to difficulties in L2 acquisition, translation and lexicography. The article shows how the corpus-based IMAGACT database, which presents a set of 1010 actions in short films and links them to the appropriate verbs in 15 languages, provides help in these fields, and how it can at the same time empirically support contrastive-typological finding

Aktionsverben im inter- und intralingualen Vergleich:: Die IMAGACT-Ontologie und ihre Erweiterung um Deutsch

This paper examines transparent and non-transparent diminutive forms in Akan and the range of meanings associated with each group, as presented in Appah/Amfo (2011). It takes the discussion of Akan diminutives a step further by showing that some of the meanings communicated by transparent diminutive forms are dependent on the context, including the semantic properties of the base to which the diminutive morpheme is attached. In addition, it demonstrates that even though the non-transparent diminutive forms communicate diminu-tive meanings and contain what appears to be the Akan diminutive morpheme, synchronical-ly they are formally unanalyzable since the putative diminutive morpheme cannot be deline-ated from the base. Also, it is argued that these forms have come from a lexicalization pro-cess that resulted in the reanalysis of the base+diminutive morpheme as a single unanalyza-ble unit. It is observed that the process of lexicalization could have been facilitated by a number of factors, including the loss of the bases from the language, which meant that the putative base could only be found in the context of their diminutive use. Finally, the lexical-ization process is schematized using formalism from Construction Morphology.This paper examines transparent and non-transparent diminutive forms in Akan and the range of meanings associated with each group, as presented in Appah/Amfo (2011). It takes the discussion of Akan diminutives a step further by showing that some of the meanings communicated by transparent diminutive forms are dependent on the context, including the semantic properties of the base to which the diminutive morpheme is attached. In addition, it demonstrates that even though the non-transparent diminutive forms communicate diminu-tive meanings and contain what appears to be the Akan diminutive morpheme, synchronical-ly they are formally unanalyzable since the putative diminutive morpheme cannot be deline-ated from the base. Also, it is argued that these forms have come from a lexicalization pro-cess that resulted in the reanalysis of the base+diminutive morpheme as a single unanalyza-ble unit. It is observed that the process of lexicalization could have been facilitated by a number of factors, including the loss of the bases from the language, which meant that the putative base could only be found in the context of their diminutive use. Finally, the lexical-ization process is schematized using formalism from Construction Morphology