Syntactic-Semantic Analysis of Perception Verbs in the Croatian Language

Abstract

This study presents a corpus approach to verbs of perception for the Croatian language, considering the fact that there has not been a single corpus-based study of the Croatian language, which considers a large number of verb lemmas that express perception verbs. A total of 86 verbs were selected from the Croatian Morphological Lexicon and divided into five semantic subgroups: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. These verbs are processed using NooJ by adding the semantic tag +prcp to mark the semantic category of a perception verb and its semantic subgroup +viz [sight], +sluh [hearing], +okus [taste], +miris [smell] and +dodir [touch]. The verbs were next explored within three different domains (a corpus of medical texts, a corpus of parliamentary texts and a corpus of children’s literature) to learn more about their syntactic and semantic features. The research corpus consisted of 214,387 forms of perception verbs in context. Corpus entries were manually validated, and linguistic information (syntactic complements and meanings of perception verbs) was assigned manually. In semantic annotation, information was added to each form of a perception verb concerning whether it expresses a prototypical, physical meaning or metaphorical meaning. In the syntactic processing, the types of predicate complements of perception verbs were annotated. The analysis showed eight different categories of predicate complements. This study includes many more perception verb lemmas than previous research, which is why it brings some new results, especially in semantic analysis.