I am a linguistics research student working on my PhD thesis dealing with verb subcategorization in Basque. I work with the IXA Group from the Computer Science Faculty of San Sebastian, in the Basque Country, which has been working on the NLP for 10-15 years. My interest is focused on getting a verb classification for Basque following the theory of B. Levin, which claims that the syntactic behavior of verbs is conditioned by their semantic. The aim of my stay here has been to compare the classification Levin proposes for English with Basque. It seems to be an evidence that the mere translation of English verbs to Basque does not imply that the verbs have the same syntactic behavior in both languages. On the one hand, the English language displays some alternations that do not exist in Basque, and therefore the classes that are distinguished only by the different behavior of one of them (such as the "dative alternation" for the distinction of "give" and "contribute" verbs), are not relevant in Basque. On the other hand, the incorporation phenomena takes place in a pretty different fashion. Consequently, the syntactic realization of some verbs is different, and the classes that are distinguished for incorporating or not a component are often irrelevant in Basque (for instance, the "manner and instrument subclasses" of Wipe verbs). However, there exist similarities in both languages that lead us to arise a verb classification in a wider sense. That is what I am going to propose for Basque as a preliminary approach.
For the colloquium series schedule, see the UMD Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series web page at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/cl_colloquium/. If you are interested in meeting with the speaker, please contact Mari Broman Olsen (molsen@umiacs.umd.edu) or Philip Resnik (resnik@umiacs.umd.edu).