The States in Changes of State

N/

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 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

Property concepts in Basaá and the ontology of gradability across category

Theories of gradability and comparison (e.g., Kamp 1975, Cresswell 1977 and many following) have been developed with data from familiar languages like English with adjectives at their core. In many languages, however, the main predicate in truth-conditionally equivalent constructions -- the property concept (PC) (cf. Dixon 1982) -- is of a different category: that of a nominal, which is predicated through possession cross-linguistically. Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2017) argue for a semantics for such nouns as mereologically and size-ordered sets of abstract portions, a treatment that keeps with their exhibition of mass noun behavior, with possessive predications and comparatives involving these nouns built on such a semantics. A semantics of this kind is not standardly assumed for adjectives and constructions built on them in familiar languages, however, raising the question whether the truth-conditional equivalence of the constructions with nouns in languages that have them and the constructions with adjectives in languages that have them should be model-theoretically represented, a position assumed by Menon and Pancheva (2014), or whether this equivalence should be captured in some other way.  Based on data from modification, degree questions, subcomparatives, and equatives in Basaá (Bantu; Cameroon), we show that adjectives and the have+PC noun construction must in fact have a type-theoretically identical semantics

From change to value difference

Degree achievements and directed motion verbs are standardly taken to describe events in which an individual undergoes change over time. The spatial uses of these verbs, giving rise to what are known as their extent readings, indicate that a temporal change based semantics is not general enough to capture their behavior. In this paper, we introduce a further range of facts that argues for a fully general analysis of the meaning of degree achievements and directed motion verbs in terms of value difference rather than temporal change. These verbs are uniformly analyzed as intensional verbs that take functional arguments and encode a difference in the value of this argument over a contextually given ordered domain. This analysis accounts naturally for their interaction with a range of adverbial modifiers

Two types of states: A cross-linguistic study of change-of-state verb roots

Event structural theories decompose verb meanings into an event template and idiosyncratic root. Many mainstream theories assume a bifurcation in the kinds of entailments contributed by roots and templates, in particular that lexical entailments of change of an individual in change-of-state verbs are only introduced by templates, not roots. We argue against such theories by comparing Levin's (1993 non-deadjectival vs. deadjectival change-of-state verb roots (e.g. crack vs. red roots). A broad-scale typological study reveals that red-type roots tend to have simple (e.g. non-deverbal) stative forms, but crack-type roots do not. Semantic studies of Kakataibo and English show that terms built on crack-type roots always entail change, while terms based on red-type roots may not. We thus suggest that crack-type roots entail change-of-state, contra Bifurcation

Master Class: Elicitation and Documentation of Verb Alignment and Argument Structure

The class examines how to go about collecting data for the purposes of documenting and describing the morphosyntactic alignment and verbal argument structure in an understudied language. The class begins with a bird’s eye view of major issues in alignment and argument structure, with the goal of considering the kinds of data that should be collected for the purposes of documentation, description, and further study. Methods for data collection are discussed, alongside positive and negative properties of the various methods. Case studies throughout the discussion are drawn from Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua)