Linguistic Analysis of Italian Perception and Speech Act Verbs

Two theoretical hypotheses are in the background of the present work, and of DELIS work in general: a corpus based lexicographical approach and a frame based semantic analysis. We assume that only a careful and detailed analysis of corpus data can constitute a sound basis for a realistic approach to lexicon building, be it a human oriented dictionary or a computationally oriented lexicon. Obviously corpus data cannot be used in a simplistic way. In order to become usable they must be analysed according to some theoretical hypothesis, according to which to model and structure what would be otherwise an unstructured set of data. The best mixture of empirical and theoretical approach is the one in which the theoretical hypothesis is itself emerging from and guided by successive analyses of the data, and is cyclically refined and adjusted to textual evidence...