Annotating Propositional Attitude Verbs and their Arguments

This paper describes the results of an empirical study on attitude verbs and propositional attitude reports in Italian. Within the framework of a project aiming at acquiring argument structures for Italian verbs from corpora, we carried out a systematic annotation to individuate which verbs are attitude verbs in Italian. The result is a list of 179 argument structures based on corpus-derived patterns of use for 126 verbs that behave as attitude verbs. The distribution of these verbs in the corpus suggests that not only the canonical that-clauses, i.e. subordinates introduced by the complementizer che, but also direct speech, infinitives introduced by the complementizer di, and some nominals are good candidates to express propositional contents in propositional attitude reports. The annotation also enlightens some issues between semantics and ontology, concerning the relation between events and propositions.