Verb

Revision as of 12:44, 27 March 2010

A verb is a LRU that denotes an action (bring, read, walk, run, murder), an occurrence (decompose, shine), or a state of being (exist, stand).

Natural Language

In the UNL^arium framework, verbs are classified as follows:

• A lexical verb (VER) is the head of a verb phrase, i.e., a word that denotes an action, an occurrence or a state of being;
• An auxiliary verb is a verb functioning to give further semantic or syntactic information about the main verb of the phrase. It can be:
  • A simple auxiliary verb (AUX) (such as "will" in "I will go", "do" in "I don't go", or "have" in "I had gone") if used only to convey information about tense and aspect;
  • A modal verb (MOD) (such as "can", "must", "have to") if used to indicate modality.
  • A copula (COP) (such as "be", "become", "seem"), also called "linking verb", if used only to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement or an adverbial).

Several verbs may be either lexical or auxiliary depending on the context

• I have a book (have = lexical verb)
• I have read the book (have = auxiliary verb)
• He appears to be tired (appear = modal verb)
• He appeared in the party (appear = lexical verb)

Verbals are non-finite verb forms that act simultaneously as a verb and as another part of speech (nouns, adjectives and adverbs)

• participles, which include past and present participles and function as adjectives (e.g. "burnt" in "burnt log", "betting" a "betting man");
• gerunds, which function as nouns and can be used with or without an article (the "running" in "running of the Bulls", "studying" and "Studying Latin is a way to better understand English")
• infinitives, which have noun-like ("be" in "the question is to be or not to be"), adjective-like ("do" in "work to do") or adverb-like functions ("talk" in "she came over to talk").
• supines
• gerundives

UNL

In UNL, lexical verbs are represented as UWs, whereas auxiliary verbs are represented as attributes. The copula verb is represented by the relation 'aoj':

• I have a book = aoj(have, I), obj(have, book)
• I have read a book = aoj(read.@perfect, I), obj(read.@perfect, book)
• He appears to be tired = aoj(tired.@belief, he)
• He appeared in the party = agt(appear.@past, he), plc(appear.@past, party)