3 Modeling Physical Causality for Action Verbs Verb semantics have been studied extensively in linguistics (Pustejovsky, 1991;Levin, 1993;Baker et al., 1998;Kingsbury and Palmer, 2002).
for action verbs (such as run, throw, cook), Hovav and Levin  propose that they can be divided into two types: manner verbs that "specify as part of their meaning a manner of carrying out an action" (e.g., nibble, rub, scribble, sweep, flutter, laugh, run, swim), and result verbs that "specify the coming about of a result state" (e.g., clean, cover, empty, fill, chop, cut, melt, open, enter).