The Roots of Verbal Meaning

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 oc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Beavers , John (auth)
Other Authors: Koontz-Garboden, Andrew (auth)
Format: Book Chapter
Published: Oxford, UK Oxford University Press 2020
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Online Access:Get Fullteks
DOAB: description of the publication
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072 7 |a CFGA  |2 bicssc 
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100 1 |a Beavers , John  |4 auth 
700 1 |a Koontz-Garboden, Andrew  |4 auth 
245 1 0 |a The Roots of Verbal Meaning 
260 |a Oxford, UK  |b Oxford University Press  |c 2020 
300 |a 1 electronic resource (288 p.) 
506 0 |a Open Access  |2 star  |f Unrestricted online access 
520 |a 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. 
536 |a University of Manchester 
536 |a Iran National Science Foundation 
540 |a Creative Commons  |f by-nc-nd/4.0/  |2 cc  |4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 
546 |a English 
650 7 |a Semantics & pragmatics  |2 bicssc 
650 7 |a Grammar, syntax & morphology  |2 bicssc 
653 |a lexical semantics 
653 |a lexical decomposition 
653 |a event structure 
653 |a root 
653 |a ditransitive verb 
653 |a change-of-state verb 
653 |a manner 
653 |a result 
653 |a sublexical modifier 
653 |a scale 
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856 4 0 |a www.oapen.org  |u https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/37787  |7 0  |z DOAB: description of the publication