linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, diathesis alternation or verb alternationLevin, B. (1993) English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL occurs when the same verb can be used in different

subcategorization frame In linguistics, subcategorization denotes the ability/necessity for lexical items (usually verbs) to require/allow the presence and types of the syntactic arguments with which they co-occur. For example, the word "walk" as in "X walks home" requi ...

s or with different valency, as in "Fred ate the pizza" (where ''ate'' is transitive, with object "the pizza") vs. "Fred ate" (where ''ate'' is intransitive, with no object). The two usages usually have a slight difference in meaning. Using a single verb, one can also change the position of a phrase's arguments which may or may not change the sentence's meaning as well. It is a hard problem for

theoretical linguistics Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics that, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to the theory of language, or the branch of linguistics that inquires into the ...

how to encode constraints on the diathesis alternation of a specific verb to a

lexicon A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...

. It is also claimed that the manner in which verbs undergo diathesis alternation can be used to identify the

semantic class A semantic class contains words that share a semantic feature. For example within nouns there are two sub classes, concrete nouns and abstract nouns. The concrete nouns include people, plants, animals, materials and objects while the abstract noun ...

they belong to e.g. in a

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

task.

Examples

* Fred ate the pizza vs. Fred ate * Mary broke the window vs. The window broke * Mary presented the flowers to John vs. Mary presented John with the flowers

Examples

References

See also