Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We develop a representation scheme for action verbs and their modifiers based on decompositional analysis emphasizing the implemeiitability of the underlying semantic primitives. Our primitives pertain to mechanical characteristics of the tasks denoted by the verbs; they refer to geometric constraints, kinematic and dynamic characteristics, and certain aspectual characteristics such as repetitiveness of one or more sub-actions, and definedness of termination points.