Verb subcategorization frequency differences between business-news and balanced corpora

Abstract

We explore the differences in verb subcategorization frequencies across several corpora in an effort to obtain stable cross corpus subcategorization probabilities for use in norming psychological experiments. For the 64 single sense verbs we looked at, subcategorization preferences were remarkably stable between British and American corpora, and between balanced corpora and financial news corpora. Of the verbs that did show differences, these differences were generally found between the balanced corpora and the financial news data. We show that all or nearly all of these shifts in subcategorization are realised via (often subtle) word sense differences. This is an interesting observation in itself, and also suggests that stable cross corpus subcategorization frequencies may be found when verb sense is adequately controlled.