Modelling Regular Subcategorization Changes in German Particle Verbs

Abstract

German particle verbs are a type of multi word expression which is often compositional with respect to a base verb. If they are compositional they tend to express the same types of semantic arguments, but they do not necessarily express them in the same syntactic subcategorization frame: some arguments may be expressed by differing syntactic subcategorization slots and other arguments may be only implicit in either the base or the particle verb. In this paper we present a method which predicts syntactic slot correspondences between syntactic slots of base and particle verb pairs. We can show that this method can predict subcategorization slot correspondences with a fair degree of success.