Class Specificity And The Lexical Encoding Of Participant Information

Abstract

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information is lexically encoded and some is not. In this paper, we propose that semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon and two continuation studies which confirm that both factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant information