English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation

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Subjects: Grammar & vocabulary, Language teaching & learning material & coursework, Language Arts & Disciplines, Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy, Language, Grammar, Language Arts & Disciplines / Grammar, English language, Verb,

A good text
This book is a result of a considerable research about English verbs! That's a good source for verbal studies even in other languages.

One of the 20th Century Classics in Linguistics
I have worked as a computational linguist for over 20 years now. And even while I was still in grad school, I grew weary of exceedingly complicated theoretical frameworks whose longevity was questionable, in part because in my experience, they have a tendency to lead to politics. But mostly this is true because I find them of marginal utility when I actually want to build something which is useful on my computer.

This book is exceedingly useful for building things on a computer... at least I have found it so.

So in my humble opinion, this book ranks with and beyond many of the what are thought of as the great works of linguistics, like, you know, Cours, Syntactic Structures, Bloomfield's and Sapir's Language, Jakobson's Kindersprache, and Humboldt's writings, which I regard very highly. And yes, I have read them all, too many times in some cases. The reason I rate this work so highly is that it consists of substantive generalizations, which by their nature must stand the test of time. Nor are they trivial generalizations.

That doesn't mean it's excessively difficult to understand what the generalizations are once you get into it. I would say that anyone who knows what a transitive verb is and who knows the difference between verbal tense and aspect would be able to follow this text if they were motivated. And if you are into text processing of any sort on a computer, like data mining or translation memory or full text retrieval, there's very good reason to be motivated to use this book.

Still there's a reason why nobody made this classification before Levin. You have to know what to look for. You have to resist the temptation to go into your head and start confusing the map with the territory. I regard this as a major problem for theoretical linguists, not only in modern times, but also historically.

The book proves that there is a relationship between the meaning of a verb and the syntactic structures that it can enter into. At the time the book was written, this was a much debated topic in the linguistics world, and I suspect that it is primarily the influence of this book which has largely laid that debate to rest. For example, one class she distinguishes (to choose completely at random) is verbs of substance emission. You can say both:

Substance/Source Alternation:
Heat radiates from the sun.
The sun radiates heat.

However, you cannot say:

The boy eats from the plate.
The plate eats the boy.

In the first half of the book, Levin distinguishes perhaps 70 syntactic alternations like this organized into 8 supercategories. In the second half, she inverts the classification. She distinguishes perhaps 150 semantic verb classes and then lists the syntactic alternations that characterize them.

For example, the Separate Verbs in English are: decouple, differentiate, disconnect, disentangle, etc. And these can undergo the transitive and intransitive Simple Reciprocal Alternations (which she defines in the first section), the Causative/Inchoative Alternation (also defined in section I) and so on.

And that's the essence of it. It is a reference work which covers about 3000 verbs in common English usage.