Diathesis alternation

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In linguistics the term diathesis alternation refers to the fact that verbs can be used in different subcategorization frames where they slightly change their semantic meaning. It is a hard problem for theoretical linguistics how to encode constraints on the diathesis alternation of a specific verb to a lexicon. It is also claimed that the manner in which verbs undergo diathesis alternation can be used to identify the semantic class they belong to e.g in a machine learning task.

[edit] Examples

  • Fred ate the pizza vs. Fred ate
  • Mary broke the window vs. The window broke