Intransitive verbs fall into two different syntactic classes, unergatives and unaccusatives. It has long been argued that verbs describing an agentive action are more likely to appear in an unergative syntax, and those describing a telic event to appear in an unaccusative syntax. However, recent work by Kim et al. (2024) found that human ratings for agentivity and telicity were a poor predictor of the syntactic behavior of intransitives. Here we revisit this question using interpretable dimensions, computed from seed words on opposite poles of the agentive and telic scales. Our findings support the link between unergativity/unaccusativity and agentivity/telicity, and demonstrate that using interpretable dimensions in conjunction with human judgments can offer valuable evidence for semantic properties that are not easily evaluated in rating tasks.

The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and telic vs. atelic events, can be modelled effectively with distributional semantics. We find that a verb's local context is most indicative of its aspectual class, and demonstrate that closed class words tend to be stronger discriminating contexts than content words. Our approach outperforms previous work on three datasets. Lastly, we contribute a dataset of human--human conversations annotated with lexical aspect and present experiments that show the correlation of telicity with genre and discourse goals.