German Verb Patterns and Their Implementation in an Electronic Dictionary

We describe an electronic lexical resource for German and the structure of its lexicon entries, notably the structure of verbal single-word and multi-word entries. The verb as the center of the sentence structure, as held by dependency models, is also a basic principle of the JAKOB narrative analysis application, for which the dictionary is the background. Different linguistic layers are combined for construing lexicon entries with a rich set of syntactic and semantic properties, suited to represent the syntactic and semantic behavior of verbal expressions (verb patterns), extracted from transcripts of real discourse, thereby lexicalizing the specific meaning of a specific verb pattern in a specific context. Verb patterns are built by the lexicographer by using a parser analyzing the input of a test clause and generating a machine-readable property string with syntactic characteristics and propositions for semantic characteristics grounded in an ontology. As an example, the German idiomatic expression ''''''``an den Karren fahren'''''''' (to come down hard on somebody) demonstrates the overall structure of a dictionary entry. The goal is to build unique dictionary entries (verb patterns) with reference to the whole of their properties.