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Semantic Descriptors: The Case of Reflexive Verbs

This paper presents a semantic classification of reflexive verbs in Bulgarian, augmenting the morphosyntactic classes of verbs in the large Bulgarian Lexical Data Base - a language resource utilized in a number of Language Engineering (LE) applications. Thesemantic descriptors conform to the Unified Eventity Representation (UER), developed by Andrea Schalley. The UER is a graphical formalism, introducing the object-oriented system design to linguistic semantics. Reflexive/non-reflexive verb pairs are analyzed where the non-reflexive member of the opposition, a two-place predicate, is considered the initial linguistic entity from which the reflexive correlate is derived. The reflexive verbs are distributed into initial syntactic-semantic classes which serve as the basis for defining the relevant semantic descriptors in the form of EVENTITY FRAME diagrams. The factors that influence the categorization of the reflexives are the lexical paradigmaticapproach to the data, the choice of only one reading for each verb, top level generalization of the semantic descriptors. The language models described in this paper provide the possibility for building linguistic components utilizable in knowledge-driven systems.