Verb forms and sub-categorizations

The purpose of this article is to report on a corpus-based investigation into the use of verbs in contemporary British English. Based on the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), the investigation examined the frequency distributions of lexical verbs in terms of their forms and transitivity types. The second part of the article reports on the coverage of verb phrase structure rules extracted from the corpus. The investigation addresses the issue of whether a moderately sized corpus, such as ICE-GB, could be used to collect representative uses of verbs for applications in, as an example, natural language parsing