Basic verbs in European languages

Abstract

This article presents a corpus-based approach toward a lexical typology of verbs in European languages, based on a comparison of the meanings of the most frequent verbs classified into semantic fields. The comparison is made in two steps. Among the twenty most frequent verbs, there is a set of grammatical verbs that top the list (with a few exceptions): ‘be’, ‘have’ and modals meaning ‘can’ and ‘must’. Among the lexical verbs, there are nine nuclear verbs with meanings that are distributed between the most basic verbal semantic fields (indicated within parentheses): ‘go’, ‘come’ (Motion); ‘give’, ‘take’ (Possession), ‘make’ (Production), ‘say’ (Verbal communication), ‘see’ (Perception), ‘know’ (Cognition), ‘want’ (Desire). Comparisons are made in two ways based on the rank order of the verbs according to descending frequency and according to a frequency measure, based on a logarithmic scale. As a second step, the comparison is extended to the 100 most frequent verbs. The result is compared to the inventories of simple verbs in some non-European languages with a very restricted number of such verbs. The frequency-based comparisons are complemented with the result of corpus-based contrastive studies of selected aspects of the semantic structure of the semantic fields to which the nuclear verbs belong.