Abstract
In the field of lexical semantics, there have been many suggestions as to how the meaning of sentences and utterances should be represented. Such theories typically make use of traditional logic frameworks, and the various words that appear in sentences, acting as subjects or objects, for instance, are mapped from the syntax to proposed semantic structures. When such structures share common rules and an overall framework, they can be related to each other in various ways. This can then be used to capture an important concept in both traditional logic, and in semantics; the notion of inference, a process that involves arriving at new truth conclusions based on given truth premises. This thesis will focus on the meaning of verbs and the entailment relations that might occur between them. It will be looking at three specific ways of representing the semantics of verbal situations, and how they capture specific entailment phenomena. The idea will be to compare the three frameworks, and to arrive at what each of them does best when it comes to verbal inference.