While approaches to exploit the syntactic behavior of verbs for the automatic acquisition of semantic verb classes from corpora have been developed in the past, they were used to recover only small verb classifications: Schulte im Walde (2006)'s work considered a semantically balanced set of 168 German verbs, Merlo and Stevenson (2001) used 60 English verbs from three particular semantic classes.
to previous work, we consider a large set of more than 600 German AO-selecting verbs and focus on their modal meaning (i.e., expressing factuality or uncertainty).