Verbspecific

Verbspecific is a term used in linguistic discussion to describe verbs whose meaning and syntactic behavior are tightly tied to particular argument types or semantic roles. The label is not widely standardized and appears mainly in discussions of verb-argument structure, lexical semantics, and annotation practices. In its broad sense, a verbspecific verb tends to restrict the subcategorization frame it licenses, shaping which arguments may occur, what their semantic roles are, and how they relate to the verb’s core meaning.

Key features commonly associated with verbspecific items include strong selectional restrictions, fixed or highly constrained valency, and predictable mappings between lexical meaning and syntactic realization. Identification of verbspecific behavior typically relies on corpus data, lexicon descriptions, and cross-linguistic comparisons to see how a given verb constrains agents, patients, recipients, themes, or locations. Verbspecific tendencies often interact with broader phenomena such as aspect, mood, and transitivity, and can vary across languages.

Examples in a general sense include verbs like give, where the verb naturally licenses a subject (agent), a direct object (theme), and an indirect object (recipient). Other verbs, such as sleep or arrive, show much looser or different argument structures. The contrast highlights that some verbs carry strong frame expectations, while others permit more flexible syntactic realizations. It should be noted that “verbspecific” is not a universally adopted term, and its exact definition may differ between theoretical frameworks and annotation schemes.

See also: verb-argument structure, subcategorization frame, valency, selectional restrictions, lexical semantics.