ABSTRACT
The most boring aspects of verbal behaviour in English are restricted in some way, and the division of verbs into subclasses is normally necessary to provide an account of the ways in which various types of behaviour are restricted. The use of inductive methods will change every time particular constructions are reanalysed in various ways, and it is likely that different semantic features will be induced from different analyses. One of the products of case grammar has been a classification of verbs. The basic intuition of case grammar is that verbs characterise the noun phrases which they occur with in terms of semantic labels such as 'Agent', 'Experiencer', 'Object'. Although case grammar is clearly a pleasing notation, the empirical claim lurking within it - that the semantic properties of verbs determine the syntactic environments they occur in - looks rather more dubious, given that semantic criteria alone prove virtually useless in determining possible case frames.
