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oapen-20.500.12657-222702024-03-22T19:23:11Z The Roots of Verbal Meaning Beavers , John Koontz-Garboden, Andrew lexical semantics lexical decomposition event structure root ditransitive verb change-of-state verb manner result sublexical modifier scale thema EDItEUR::C Language and Linguistics::CF Linguistics::CFG Semantics, discourse analysis, stylistics thema EDItEUR::C Language and Linguistics::CF Linguistics::CFK Grammar, syntax and morphology This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It adopts the now common view that verb meanings consist at least partly of an event structure, made up of an event template describing the verb’s broad temporal and causal contours that occurs across lots of verbs and groups them into semantic and grammatical classes, plus an idiosyncratic root describing specific, real world states and actions that distinguish verbs with the same template. While much work has focused on templates, less work has addressed the truth conditional contributions of roots, despite the importance of a theory of root meaning in fully defining the predictions event structural approaches make. This book addresses this lacuna, exploring two previously proposed constraints on root meaning: The Bifurcation Thesis of Roots, whereby roots never introduce the meanings introduced by templates, and Manner/Result Complementarity, which has as a component that roots can describe either a manner or a result state but never both at the same time. Two extended case studies, on change-of-state verbs and ditransitive verbs of caused possession, show that neither hypothesis holds, and that ultimately there may be no constraints on what a root can mean. Nonetheless, the book argues that event structures still have predictive value, and it presents a new theory of possible root meanings and how they interact with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, albeit one where not just templates but also roots determine systematic semantic and grammatical properties. 2020-03-28 16:19:02 2020-04-01T06:48:00Z 2020-04-01T06:48:00Z 2020 book 1007905 http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22270 eng Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics application/pdf n/a 9780198855781.pdf https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-roots-of-verbal-meaning-9780198855781 Oxford University Press 10.1093/oso/9780198855781.003.0001 10.1093/oso/9780198855781.003.0001 b9501915-cdee-4f2a-8030-9c0b187854b2 a897f645-c917-4be8-a0db-e8b3f64cac47 53541418-d476-4585-b139-541099622dc9 74 288 Oxford, UK BCS-1451765 University of Manchester The University of Manchester National Science Foundation NSF open access
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This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It adopts the now common view that verb meanings consist at least partly of an event structure, made up of an event template describing the verb’s broad temporal and causal contours that occurs across lots of verbs and groups them into semantic and grammatical classes, plus an idiosyncratic root describing specific, real world states and actions that distinguish verbs with the same template. While much work has focused on templates, less work has addressed the truth conditional contributions of roots, despite the importance of a theory of root meaning in fully defining the predictions event structural approaches make. This book addresses this lacuna, exploring two previously proposed constraints on root meaning: The Bifurcation Thesis of Roots, whereby roots never introduce the meanings introduced by templates, and Manner/Result Complementarity, which has as a component that roots can describe either a manner or a result state but never both at the same time. Two extended case studies, on change-of-state verbs and ditransitive verbs of caused possession, show that neither hypothesis holds, and that ultimately there may be no constraints on what a root can mean. Nonetheless, the book argues that event structures still have predictive value, and it presents a new theory of possible root meanings and how they interact with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, albeit one where not just templates but also roots determine systematic semantic and grammatical properties.
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