Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs

The papers collected in this book cover contemporary and original research on semantic and grammatical issues of nouns and noun phrases, verbs and sentences, and aspects of the combination of nouns and verbs, in a great variety of languages. A special focus is put on noun types, tense and aspect semantics, granularity of verb meaning, and subcompositionality. The investigated languages and language groups include Austronesian, East Asian, Slavic, German, English, Hungarian and Lakhota. The collection provided in this book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students specialising in the fields of semantics, morphology, syntax, typology, and cognitive sciences

Argument Structure and Unaccusativity in the Constraint-based Lexicon

This paper addresses the issue of Split Intransitivity (si) and Unaccusative Mis-matches (uMs), proposing a constraint-based approach to si and ums within a recent framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. I argue against the widely accepted dichotomous distinction of intransitive verbs, which has been advanced by the Unaccusative Hypothesis [Perlmutter (1978)]. I then propose a quadripartitive distinction of intransitive verbs on the basis of the distribution of subject argument in the semantically motivated argument structure, and show that this quadriparti-tive distinction allows a better understanding of si and ums. The main idea of this proposal will be summarized as the Quadripartitive Split Intransitivity Hypothesis (Qsm). 1 The Problem It has long been observed cross-linguistically that intransitive verbs show some non-random grammatical heterogeneity. Ever since Perlmutter's Unaccusative Hypothesis [uH, Perlmutter (1978)], as formulated below in (1), later researchers have widely ac