From lexicological to lexicographical issues: Italian verbs with predicative complement

Intransitive (e.g., become) and transitive (e.g., consider) verbs obligatorily requiring a predicative complement are an interesting, and at the same time problematic issue both at a theoretical and at a lexicographical level. In this paper we focus on Italian verbs, and on the way two computational semantic lexica deal with them. Both in ItalWorNet and in SIMPLE the treatment of these verbs shows to be problematic, since the information appears to refer to the ‘verb + predicative complement’ complex rather than to the verb itself. Recognizing that verb and predicative complement contribute to the construction of a unitary event, we believe that it is nevertheless possible, and useful, to isolate the role of the two components. The description proposed here is based on the Generative Lexicon model (Pustejovsky 1995), and it is in line with the recent project of a lexical resource for (sub)event structure (Im and Pustejovsky 2009). Verb and predicative complement codify each a different part of the subevent structure. To give an example, ‘diventare (‘become’) + predicative complement’ is a transition, where diventare codifies the process subevent, and the predicative complement codifies the (result) state subevent. This kind of analysis can possibly be integrated into the SIMPLE lexicon, which is already built following the Generative Lexicon model.