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This article presents a system which allows components of situations referred to by communication verbs to be combined in different ways to yield representations of different reference situation types. These are subsequently used as the basis of a comparison of the corresponding communication verbs in German and Spanish. Verbs referring to the same special reference situation type are shown to constitute a lexical field. Concentrating on the lexical fields of German and Spanish forbid-verbs, specific types of inform-verbs and persuade-verbs, we show that the procedure applied may in principle be used to cover the whole inventory of communication verbs in a bilingual conceptual (i.e. onomasiological) dictionary.
Kommunikationsverben, an online reference work on German communication verbs and part of the dictionary portal OWID, describes the meaning of communication verbs on two levels: a lexical level, represented in the dictionary entries and by sets of lexical features, and a conceptual level, represented by different types of situations referred to by specific types of verbs. These two levels have each been implemented in special types of access structures. A first explorative access to the conceptual level provides the user with a list of the main classes of communication verbs, the subclasses of each of these, and the lexical fields pertaining to each subclass. Lexical fields are presented together with a characterisation of the situation type to which the verbs of that field are used to refer. Information about the conceptual level is additionally accessible by an advanced search option allowing the user to combine components of the characterisation of situation types to “create” any kind of situation and search for the verbs that correspond to it. Information about the lexical level of the meaning of communication verbs is accessible via the dictionary entries and by another advanced search option allowing the user to search for verbs with particular lexical features or combinations of these.