Verb Senses and Argument Semantics: from Linguistic Theory to Lexicographic Practice

In this paper, we illustrate the procedure we adopted to encode the semantic phenomena at play between verbs and their arguments in two electronic dictionaries of argument structures for Italian and Croatian verbs. The procedure is based on the theoretical assumption that both verbs and arguments are active in semantic composition and influence each other’s meanings when they combine in sentences. We first focus on cases where arguments contribute to the meaning acquired by verbs in their context of use, and then we turn to cases in which it is the verb that contextually induces a change in the semantics of the arguments. We present a quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis of the results we obtained by applying our procedure to 1160 Italian verbs and 180 Croatian verbs, showing that the theoretical assumption holds cross-linguistically and is both necessary and valuable in lexicographic practice.