Classifying the Simple Verbs with the Complement of the Preposition /be/: a Corpus-based Research

Abstract

Among simple prepositions, we can name ɂaz ‘from’; be ‘to’; daɹ ‘in’; baɹaye ‘for’ and ba ‘with’. The simple prepositions are the most frequent language unit when we search different corpora. This frequency confirms the importance of these language units. Prepositional phrases appear in the sentence either as an argument or as an adjunct. The purpose of this research is to classify the simple verbs with the object of the preposition /be/ in Persian language. This research has used Levin's approach in categorizing English verbs. Levin believes that the similarity of syntactic behavior and syntactic valence of verbs can lead to semantic similarities. In this paper, to investigate this issue, about 200 simple Persian sense verbs that have the object of the preposition /be/ were selected and extracted from the Syntactic Valency Lexicon for Persian Verb (gathered according dependency grammar), and then classified according to Levin's approach. The classification of the data indicated that these verbs could be grouped into seven semantic categories. It is obvious that achieving these semantic classes is useful for language learning and teaching the verbs as the core of the sentence.

Keywords

• preposition
• syntactic valence of verb
• corpus linguistics
• prepositional object
• persian language