Simultaneous Amalgamation - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 159

4. three-place inf. object: John tried to give Mary a kiss.
5. inf. with prepositional object: Julia tried to put the flower in a vase.
6. inf. with object sentence recursion: Julia tried to say that Bill believes
that Mary suspects that Susy knows that Lucy loves Tom . ...
The try class of concepts is defined as a two-place verb which can take (i)
an infinitive or (ii) a noun as its object. The implicit subject of the infinitive
equals the subject of the matrix concept (subject control). As indicated by
the examples 2-6 in 8.5.1, the choice of the verb representing the infinitive
is completely unrestricted in that it may be one-place, two-place, or three-
place; taking a prepositional object, an object sentence, or an iteration of object
sentences; and so on.
These properties may be formalized as the following schema:

8.5.2 D EFINITION OF try CLASS INFINITIVES

verb \ verb noun \ verb

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

verb: α
arg: γβ

noun: β
fnc: α

verb: α
arg: γβ

verb: β
fnc: α
arg: γ X

to read try cookie try (examples of matching proplets,
for illustration only)
where α {begin, can afford, choose, decide, expect, forget, learn, like, manage, need, offer, plan,
prepare, refuse, start, try, want}
Selectional constellations :
matrix verb α

subject γ infinitival object β

begin 18 992 people 204, men 55, government 54, number 49, . . . feel 528, be 492, take 371, . . .

can afford 1841 ... ...

...
matrix verb α subject γ nominal object β

begin 6 642 government 32, people 26, commission 24, . . . work 206, career 141, life 113, . . .

can afford 1542 ... ...

...
As in the schema 8.4.3, the infinitive's wide range of possible objects is indi-
cated by the variable X in the first schema (cf. [arg:

X] ).
Definition 8.5.2 refines 8.4.3 as follows. It (i) lists all possible matrix verb
concepts of the try class as a restriction on the variable

γ

. It (ii) provides an
alternative schema for a noun object instead of an infinitive. And it (iii) lists
the selectional constellations between each matrix verb

α

α , its subjects γ and

its infinitival or nominal objects as n-tuples, for n=3. The numbers represent

the actual BNC frequencies for each constellation, in decreasing order. 16

β

16 Thanks to T. Proisl for determining the BNC frequencies in 8.5.2 and 8.5.3. The restrictions on the
variable α were gleaned from Sorensen (1997). In contradistinction to the selectional restrictions of
generative grammar (e.g., Klima 1964), the selectional constellations of DBS record the distributional
facts in a corpus. For the results to be compelling, an RMD corpus should be used.