hierarchical representations of verb meanings
Nouns can quite easily be represented in semantic hierarchies...
...with "hyponyms" serving as specific instances of "hypernyms."
Q: Does anyone know of similar representations of verbs?
Some notes:
I'm looking for systematic representations of semantic relationships
I'm not looking for categorization of verbs by behaviour (for this, we can turn to books like English Verb Classes and Alternations by Beth Levin, which does argue that verb behaviour is determined to a great extent by meaning but does not arrange verbs hierarchically)
I'm not looking for WordNet, which groups words into "synsets" but does not represent verbs hierarchically
As an example: "get" can have the meaning of "come into possession of"; branching down from that meaning, we can identify "obtain" and "acquire," which mean "come into possession of by unidentified methods;" below "obtain/acquire," we might divide into "find" (come into possession of by chance), "receive" (come into possession of passively), and "procure" (come into possession of actively); below "procure" we might have "buy/purchase," "steal," "trade for," and so on.
Thanks in advance! And if the crowd feels that this question would find a better home in the Linguistics Stack Exchange, please let me know.
ADDED: I understand that in computer science hyponymy is expressed as an "is-a" relationship. How do computer scientists express the relationship among commands or actions?
Solution 1:
Hierarchies are useful when they arise naturally and have metaphoric hooks.
But hierarchies require an Up/Down dimension, and that's not present in some perceptual fields.
Verbs use taxonomies, of various sorts, since there are various sorts of verbs.
Here's an example of a taxonomy of English Verbs of Unaided Human Locomotion, an unfinished web project I set up as an example for the students in my lexical semantics class.
And here's another example, a taxonomy of English Verbs of Cutting, with the various subclasses and dimensions of distinction (most of which are not hierarchical) laid out.
Those are for actions, which are complex, but observable.
There are also taxonomies for verbs of perception, emotion, and thought,
which are complex but unobservable.
For instance, many verbs subcategorize according to Stative/Inchoative/Causative dimensions.
Or Presupposed/Entailed/Asserted/Denied dimensions.
Or any of a range of other possibilities.