  We revisit Levin's theory about the correspondence of verb meaning and syntax
and infer semantic classes from a large syntactic classification of more than
600 German verbs taking clausal and non-finite arguments. Grasping the meaning
components of Levin-classes is known to be hard. We address this challenge by
setting up a multi-perspective semantic characterization of the inferred
classes. To this end, we link the inferred classes and their English
translation to independently constructed semantic classes in three different
lexicons - the German wordnet GermaNet, VerbNet and FrameNet - and perform a
detailed analysis and evaluation of the resulting German-English classification
(available at www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/modality-verbclasses/).
