<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W99-0503">
  <Title>merlo(c)lettres unlge ch</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="16" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Determining the Features
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this sectmn, we present mouvatmn for the mttml features that we mvesUgated m terms of their role m learmng the verb classes We first present the hngmstlcally den~ed features then turn to e~tdence from experimental psychohngutstlcs to e\tend the set of potentially relevant features</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="16" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.1 Features of the Velb Classes
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The three verb classes under mvesugatmn - unerga-Uves, unaccusaUves, and object-drop -differ m the properties of their translttve/mtranslhve a\[terna-Uons, which are exemphfied below  The sentences m (1) use an unergatwe velb. ,accd Unergatlves are mttansluve actmn verbs whose transttlve form is the causattve counterpart of the mtransluve form Thus, the subject of the intransitive (la) becomes the object of the translh~e (lb) (Brousseau and Rltter 1991, Hale and ke~set 1993 Levm and Rappaport Ho~,av, 1995) The sentences m (2) use an unaccusaUve verb, melted Lnaccusatlves are intransitive change of state ~et bs (2a) hke unergauves, the translu~e counterpart for the.,e verbs ts also causative (2b) The sentence~ m (3) use an object-dtop verb washed, the~e ','elt:,~ haxe a non-causaU~e tran'~ltl~,e/intransltl~,,e al\[elnC/ltton in ~ hlch the object is sm~pl~ opttonal Both unergauves and unaccusatl~es \[la~e a causattve trans~u~e form, but differ m the semanuc roles that they assign to the paructpants m the e~ent described In an mtranstUve unetgaUve, the ',ubject ts an 4.gent Ithe doer of the e~ent), and m an Intransitive unaccusaUve, the subject ts a Theme (~omething affected by the e~ent) The role assignments to the corresponding semanuc arguments of the ttans~u~e forms--I e, the dnect objects--a~e the ~ame  with the addition of a Causal Agent (the causer of the event) as subject in both cases Object-drop verbs simply assign Agent to the subject and Theme to the optional object We expect the differing semantic role assignments of the verb classes to be reflected m their syntactic behavior, and consequently in the distributional data we collect from a corpus The three classes can be characterized by their occurrence in two alternations the transittve/mtrans~tive alternation and the causative alternation Unergatives are distinguished from the other classes m being rare in the transitive form (see (Stevenson and Merlo, 1997) for an explanation of this fact) Both unergatives and unaccusatives are dlstmgmshed from obJect-drop m being causative in their transitive form, and sundarly we expect this to be reflected in amount of detectable causative use Furthermore, since the caus&amp;tlve is a transitive use, and the transitive use of unergatlves is expected to be rare, causativity should primarily distinguish unaccusatlves from object-drops In conclusion, we expect the defining features of the verb classes--the intransitive/transitive and causative ~lternatlons--to lead to distributional differences m the observed usages of the verbs in these</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The verbs under study not only differ in their thematic properties, they also differ in their processmg properties Because these verbs can occur both in a trans~tive and an intransitive form, they have been particularly studied in the context of the mare verb/reduced relative (MV/I:tR) ambiguity illustrated below (Bever, 1970) The horse raced past the barn fell The verb ~aced can be interpreted as either a past tense main verb, or as a past participle w~thm a reduced relative clause (l e , the horse \[that was\] raced past the barn) Because fell is the main verb, the leduced relative lnterpretatmn of raced is required for a coherent analysis of the complete sentence But the main verb interpretation of raced is so strongly preferred that people experience great difficulty at the verb fell, unable to integrate it with the interpretation that has been developed to that point However, the reduced relative interpretation is not difficult for all verbs, as in the follo~mg example The boy washed in the tub was angry The difference in ease of interpreting the lesolutions of this ambiguity has been shown to be sensitive to both frequency differentials (MacDonald 1994, Trueswell, 1996) and to verb class d~stmctmns (Stevenson and Merlo, 1997, Flhp et al , 1999) Consider the features that d~stmguish the t~o resolutions of the M\,/RR ambiguity MV The horse raced past the barn quickly RR The horse raced past the barn fell In the main verb resolution, the ambiguous ~erb raced is used in its intransitive form, while in the reduced relative, it is used in its transitive, causative form These features correspond directly to the defining alternations of the three verb classes under study (intransitive/transitive, causative) ~,ddltionally, we see that other related features to these usages serve to distinguish the two resolutions of the ambiguity The mare verb form Is active and a mare verb part-of-speech (labeled as VBD by automatic POS taggers), by contrast, the reduced relative foim is passive and a past partic~ple (tagged as \ BN) Since these features (active/passive and VBD/VBN) are related to the intransitive/transitive alteination, we expect them to also exhibit d~stributloaal differences among the verb classes Specifically, ~e expect the unergatives to yield a higher proportion of act~ e and &amp;quot;vBD usage, since, as noted above, the transitive use of unergatwes is rare</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>