SEMANTICS FIRST! RETHINKING THE ROLE OF SYNTAX IN VERB CLASSIFICATION

In this paper, we address two major weaknesses of syntacticallyoriented studies that have been conducted since the 1990s in order to pin down the semantic properties of verbs and group them into classes. These limitations include the challenge of clearly distinguishing arguments from adjuncts, as well as the difficulty of systematically accounting for the optionality in the syntactic realization of arguments. We argue that these weaknesses may be overcome by adopting a semantic-oriented approach in which semantic analysis takes priority and encompasses semantic flexibility of word meanings. Specifically, we propose that arguments are complements that play a role in influencing the meaning that the verb acquires in context, whereas adjuncts do not have an impact on the verb semantics. We also propose that whether an argument is syntactically optional or mandatory in a sentence is determined by semantic factors, specifically how much the argument is semantically incorporated into the verb it depends on. Our analysis is based on Italian data but the conclusions are generally applicable for other languages as well.