Verb similarity: Comparative analysis between theoretical linguistics and corpus data

Abstract

The concept of similarity is crucial for fields belonging to cognitive science and linguistics. However, it is a broad notion that can be approached through multiple perspectives. In this work we carry out a comparative analysis on how two of these perspectives articulate similarity between verb senses in Spanish. The first perspective is based on corpus linguistics, specifically on semantic roles annotated on a Spanish corpus, as representation of argument structure associated to verb senses. The second perspective belongs to the field of theoretical linguistics and is embodied by the constructions that a verb instantiates. With such comparison we aim to investigate whether argument structure obtained from corpus, which reflects the expression of an event, configures verb similarity in a manner congruent with the way in which constructions do it, which are argued to contain argument structure too and to constitute key elements in the generation of sentence meaning. The results of the comparison show that there is a significant correlation between the similarity formalization of both perspectives, particularly when we take into account syntactic and pattern information from corpus. Additionally, the results attribute particular importance to the aspectual opposition of stativity-dynamicity as the backbone of the similarity-dissimilarity axis for constructions.