[Corpora-List] Subcat Questions

[Ute Römer]

Dear Peet and others,

> Everything I've been finding on this subject is as clear as mud, and
> written using terms that I don't understand

I'm not too happy with the usual main-anchor-and-argument-explanations either. I
explained verbal subcategorisation frames to my intro to linguistics students
this morning as the combination of complements (obligatory constituents) a verb
(as head of a VP) takes. I told them that they should try to find out which
constituents the head requires, in other words, try to see which phrases a
lexical item subcategorises for, exemplified by "put" [__ NP PP], "put something
somewhere" (my example was "I put the tape into the machine" FLOB). I then
mentioned that verbs with the same SF may share certain meaning features (e.g.
put and place; "I placed the slide in the viewer" FLOB), pointing towards the
grammar patterns direction. Sorry if this is too simple or not computational
enough.

Best wishes... Ute