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From: rapaport@cse.buffalo.edu (William J. Rapaport)
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Subject: BASIC-LEVEL VERBS
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 14:56:23 -0500 (EST)
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: BASIC-LEVEL VERBS
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A student writes:

> I was wondering if there is a basic level category system for verbs.
> 
> During the seminar today I was thinking of:
> 
> EXIST
>   |
> MOVE
>   |
> RUN (basic level category?)
>   |
> SPRINT
> 
> where the arcs are "kind of" (i.e. sprinting is a kind of running which is
> a kind of moving which is a kind of existing (being?)).

I don't know offhand of any studies on this (you might send email to 
cogsci-members-list@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu to see if anyone in the
Center for Cognitive Science knows), but it seems pretty clear that
there should be, as shown by your example.

There are certainly attempts to categorize verbs (or, rather, the
actions they denote) in ways similar to the ways nouns (or, rather, the
objects they denote) are categorized in taxonomic hierarchies.

Two that come to mind are Roger Schank's AI theory of conceptual
dependency  (see http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/676/F01/cd.html
for some references and examples) and Beth Levin's study of English
verbs:

TITLE:English verb classes and alternations : a preliminary investigation
AUTHOR:Levin, Beth, 1955- 
PUBLISHED:Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1993.
LOCKWOOD Book Collection PE1271 .L48 1993 

The original study of "basic-level" categories is due to Eleanor Rosch;
see:

Rosch, Eleanor  (1978), "Principles of Categorization", in Eleanor
Rosch & Barbara B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates): 27-48.

(and there have been numerous follow-up studies; try a Google search).