Verb meaning and combinatory semantics: a corpus based study of Spanish change of state verbs

Even though it is an intuitive and perhaps obvious idea that composition leads to non-trivial semantic interactions between words, and these interactions affect the contents of predication, there has still been little work done on how verbs restrict their arguments and how flexible these restrictions are. This dissertation thus starts out with the observation that verbs have very rich combinatorial paradigms and raises the question of what this wide combinatorial capacity of verbs means for the semantics of the verb and the process of composition. Distributed in three case studies, a rich data set of the Spanish change of state verbs congelar ‘freeze’, romper ‘break’ and cortar ‘cut’ is analysed and further discussed against the background of studies from theoretical linguistics. Tackling the question of the rich combinatorial paradigm of verbs leads to taking a position on the theoretical horizon of theories of predication as well as theories of lexicon, for which I turn to Modern Type Theories and an underspecified lexical meaningAunque es intuitiva y quizás obvia la idea de que la composición conduce a interacciones semánticas no triviales entre las palabras que afectan al contenido de una predicación, hay todavía pocos trabajos que analicen el modo como los verbos restringen sus argumentos y examinen si sus restricciones son muy amplias o más bien limitadas. Esta tesis parte de la observación de que los verbos tienen unos paradigmas combinatorios muy ricos, para plantear la pregunta acerca del papel que desempeña la combinatoria predicado-argumento tanto en el significado de los verbos como en el proceso de construcción del significado composicional. Se llevan a cabo tres estudios de caso correspondientes a otros tantos verbos de cambio de estado, congelar, romper y cortar, en los que se presenta una rica colección de datos que se discute a la luz del conocimiento que proporcionan los estudios de lingüística teórica. Abordar la cuestión del rico paradigma de combinatoria de los verbos conduce a tomar una posición en el horizonte de las teorías de la predicación, así como también en el de las teorías del léxico. La presente tesis se decanta en este sentido por la teoría de tipos moderna (Modern Type Theory) y un significado léxico subespecificado

Distinguishing coercion and underspecification in Type Composition Logic

This paper investigates the meaning adaptability of change of state (CoS) verbs. It argues that both coercion and underspecification are necessary mechanisms in order to properly account for the semantic adaptability observable for CoS verbs in combination with their complements. This type of meaning adaptability has received little formal attention to date, although some recent work has already led the way on this topic (Spalek, 2014; Lukassek and Spalek, 2016; Asher et al., 2017). Our paper is part of a cross-linguistic case study of German einfrieren and Spanish congelar (‘freeze’). We model the meaning adaptability of this test case within Type Composition Logic (TCL) (Asher, 2011). We build on Asher’s coercion mechanism and introduce an additional mechanism for underspecification that exploits the fine-grained type system in TCL

To Finish in German and Mainland Scandinavian: Telicity and Incrementality

Among the words that describe initial or final parts of events, words describing finishing stand out in a number of ways: in a language like English, there is a transitive verb which is singularly flexible regarding the type of event retrievable from the context; in a language like German, there is no verb but there is a verbal particle; in either case, there is a requirement of telicity and there is a requirement of theme incrementality. The present paper documents these facts and offers an analysis of the verbal particle