Using Argument Structure to Disambiguate Verb Meaning

This study proposes a methodology to disambiguate verb meaning in terminographic resources. To this end, the underlying approach used for verb entries description in the environmental knowledge base EcoLexicon has been applied (Buendia, Montero and Faber 2014; Faber and Buendia 2014). The description is based on three parameters: (i) the nuclear meaning of the verb (i.e. its lexical domain, as proposed by the Lexical Grammar Model (Faber & Mairal 1999); (ii) its meaning dimension (i.e. the lexical subdomain); (iii) its predicate-argument structure highlighting the semantic categories of the arguments. Our study proves that a verb can activate different meaning dimensions in different lexical domains, depending on the semantic categories, or different roles (Van Valin 2005) of its arguments. This way of describing verb meaning according to lexical domains and subdomains, semantic roles and semantic categories helps to disambiguate verbs and represent their meaning in specialized resources.