VerbLex: A verb lexicon model of Greek and German

This project is the construction of a lexical-semantic and morpho-syntactic model for the study of verb classes and their alternations in Greek, in contrast to German. Adopting the hypothesis presented by Levin (1993) that semantic properties of a verb determine the syntactic realization of their arguments, the project compares the grammatical behavior of verb classes like change of state verbs (CoS) (i.e., open, close), break verbs (i.e, break, crack) (s. Levin, 2013, Fillmore, 1970) in Greek in contrast to German, and introduces an analysis of comparative concepts.

The project will be organized across two main pillars: initially, (i) we will offer a theoretical analysis for selected classes of Greek verbs (see ex. 2b-d, 3a,b, 4a,b, 8a-c, 9, 10, 11), while (ii) we will group Greek verbs into classes based on semantic and morpho-syntactic properties and we will provide a comparative analysis with similar classes in German. We will adopt a bottom-up methodology: the verbs will be collected mostly from Greek dictionaries and databases. The Appendix completes the verb lexicon.