In her English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, Levin (1993) proposes classifications for verbs in English. Is this classification of a syntactic nature , semantic one or both?
off course it is a semantically based approach of classifying verbs, still, the syntactic nature of the verbs under analysis is taken into consideration.
It basically depends on certain factors including verb construction, lexical behavior -whether it indicates action or abstraction, meaning extension of verbs, and speaker's orientation in using the lexical verbs.