English. Investigating lexical access, representation and processing involves dealing with conceptual abstractness: abstract concepts are known to be more quickly and easily delivered in human communications than abstract meanings (Binder et al., 2005) . Although these aspects have long been left unexplored, they are relevant: abstract terms are widespread in ordinary language, as they contribute to the realisation of various sorts of figurative language (metaphors, metonymies, hyperboles,

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... . Abstractness is therefore an issue for computational linguistics, as well. In this paper we illustrate how to characterise verbs with abstractness information. We provide an experimental evaluation of the presented approach on the largest existing corpus annotated with abstraction scores: our results exhibit good correlation with human ratings, and point out some open issues that will be addressed in future work. Italiano. In questo lavoro presentiamo il tema dell'astrattezza come una caratteristica diffusa del linguaggio, e un nodo cruciale nell'elaborazione automatica del linguaggio. In particolare illustriamo un metodo per la stima dell'astrattezza che caratterizza i verbi a partire dalla composizione dei punteggi di astrattezza degli argomenti dei verbi utilizzando la risorsa Abs-COVER.