scholarly journals The Roots of Verbal Meaning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Beavers ◽  
Andrew Koontz-Garboden
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Event Structure ◽  
Result State ◽  
Word Meanings ◽  
Common View ◽  
Event Structures ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Ditransitive Verbs ◽  
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.

Manner and Result in the Roots of Verbal Meaning

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Beavers ◽  
Andrew Koontz-Garboden
Keyword(s):  
Event Structure ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Verbal Meaning ◽  
Manner Verbs

Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2010) argue that verbs fall into (at least) two classes: result verbs (e.g., break) and manner verbs (e.g., run). No verb encodes both manner and result simultaneously, a truth-conditional fact that Rappaport Hovav and Levin argue follows from how verb meanings are composed at the level of event structure. However, a key issue in verifying this claim is isolating truth-conditional diagnostics for manner and result. We develop and review a number of such diagnostics and show that there are verbs that encode both meanings together, counterexemplifying their truth-conditional complementarity. However, using evidence from scopal adverbs, we argue that when the meanings occur together, they are encoded in a single, undecomposable manner+result root at event structure. This fact validates complementarity as a fact about how many and what types of roots may occur in an event structure, though it also argues for a richer typology of roots than is typically assumed, including those encoding manner and result simultaneously.

scholarly journals On inchoative states. Evidence from modification of Polish perfective psych verbs by degree quantifiers

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Ewa Willim
Keyword(s):  
Event Structure ◽  
Perfective Aspect ◽  
Lexical Aspect ◽  
Measure Function ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Psych Verbs ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThe special properties that psych(ological) verbs manifest cross-linguistically have given rise to on-going debates in syntactic and semantic theorizing. Regarding their lexical aspect classification, while verbal psych predicates with the Experiencer argument mapped onto the subject (SE psych predicates) have generally been analyzed as stative, there is little agreement on what kinds of eventualities object Experiencer (OE) psych predicates describe. On the stative reading, OE psych predicates have been classified as atelic causative states. On the (non-agentive) eventive reading, they have been widely analyzed as telic change of state predicates and classified as achievements or as accomplishments. Based on Polish, Rozwadowska (2003, 2012) argues that nonagentive eventive OE psych predicates in the perfective aspect denote an onset of a state and that they are atelic rather than telic. This paper offers further support for the view that Polish perfective psych verbs do not denote a change of state, i.e., a transition from α to ¬α. The evidence is drawn from verbal comparison and the distribution of the comparative degree quantifier jeszcze bardziej ‘even more’ in perfective psych predicates. It is argued here that in contexts including jeszcze bardziej ‘even more’, the perfective predication denotes an onset of a state whose degree of intensity exceeds the comparative standard. While a degree quantifier attached to the VP in the syntax contributes a differential measure function that returns a (vague) value representing the degree to which the intensity of the Experiencer’s state exceeds the comparative standard in the event, it does not affect the event structure of the perfective verb and it does not provide the VP denotation it modifies with a final endpoint. As the perfective picks the onset of an upper open state, perfective psych predicates typically give rise to an atelic interpretation.

scholarly journals Unsupervised Neural Aspect Extraction with Sememes

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ling Luo ◽  
Xiang Ao ◽  
Yan Song ◽  
Jinyao Li ◽  
Xiaopeng Yang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Latent Variables ◽  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Word Meanings ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Aspect Extraction ◽  
Real World Datasets ◽  
Semantic Resources

Aspect extraction relies on identifying aspects by discovering coherence among words, which is challenging when word meanings are diversified and processing on short texts. To enhance the performance on aspect extraction, leveraging lexical semantic resources is a possible solution to such challenge. In this paper, we present an unsupervised neural framework that leverages sememes to enhance lexical semantics. The overall framework is analogous to an autoenoder which reconstructs sentence representations and learns aspects by latent variables. Two models that form sentence representations are proposed by exploiting sememes via (1) a hierarchical attention; (2) a context-enhanced attention. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the validity and the effectiveness of our models, which significantly outperforms existing baselines.

On the Event Structural Properties of the English Get-Passive

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-74
Author(s):  
Alison Biggs ◽  
David Embick
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Structural Properties ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Event Structure ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Event Structures ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
Responsible Party

An important ongoing discussion in theories of argument structure concerns the explanatory division of labor between thematic properties and event structure. In this context, the English get-passive provides an interesting test case. Much previous work has analyzed get-passives as differing thematically from be-passives. Yet many get-passive properties remain poorly understood. We present an analysis of the get-passive centered on the proposal that it contains additional event structure (realized as get) relative to its be counterpart. We employ by-adjuncts to identify the event structures in passive types, and demonstrate that the behavior of this and other diagnostics support the conclusion that get- and be-passives differ systematically in ways that accord with our analysis. Further discussion considers the prominent proposal from previous studies that get-passives differ thematically from be-passives in (sometimes) assigning an Agent role to their surface subjects. We show that there is no evidence for such an analysis. Instead, intuitions about the interpretation of the get-passive surface subject arise from how an event’s Responsible Party is identified: contrasts between get and be on this dimension are a consequence of event structural differences between the two. The overall result is a unified analysis of the get-passive, one that has implications for the role of event structure in understanding the syntax and interpretation of arguments.

Sublexical modality in defeasible causative verbs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabienne Martin ◽  
Florian Schäfer
Keyword(s):  
Learning Process ◽  
Event Structures ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Modal Component ◽  
Intentional Agents ◽  
Causative Verbs

This chapter is dedicated to an ambiguity characteristic of what we call defeasible causative verbs (of which ‘teach’ is an example). With agentive subjects, the change of state (CoS) encoded by these verbs (e.g. a learning process) can be entirely denied, giving rise to what we call the “zero-CoS” non-culminating reading of these verbs. With causer subjects, however, the same verbs seem to entail the occurrence of (a part of) the CoS (including in imperfective sentences). We argue that this ambiguity cannot be handled by positing different event structures under the agentive and non-agentive uses. Under the analysis proposed, the semantics of these verbs involve a sublexical modal component à la Koenig and Davis (2001), both with agent and causer subjects. In favor of positing a sublexical modality with all types of subject, we investigate the conditions under which the zero-CoS reading is available even with a subset of inanimate subjects and “non-intentional” agents.

Constructions with get

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 21-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Bonnefille
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Real World ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
State Construction

The present article analyzes the copular realization of GET in relation to its lexical transitive, intransitive motion and passive realizations. The change-of-state construction was previously defined by the author as X CHANGES TO Ystate. If COME, GO, TURN… copular realizations were proved to be constrained (Bonnefille, 2001 and 2004; Bonnefille & McMichael, 2001) by X MOVES TO Ylocation (Goldberg, 1995), the search for real-world constraints at work in this construction when used with GET leads us to the conclusion that the copular realization of GET is constrained by the blending of two constructions, i.e. X MOVES TO Ylocation and either X EXPERIENCES Y (with the meaning “receiving an object”) or X ACTS ON Y (with the meaning “obtaining/possessing an object”), depending on the degree of agenthood of X.

scholarly journals A Cartesian closed category of event structures with quotients

2006 ◽  
Vol Vol. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samy Abbes
Keyword(s):  
Topological Space ◽  
Event Structure ◽  
Cartesian Closed Category ◽  
New Class ◽  
Closed Category ◽  
Event Structures ◽  
Natural Notion ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Cartesian Closed

International audience We introduce a new class of morphisms for event structures. The category obtained is cartesian closed, and a natural notion of quotient event structure is defined within it. We study in particular the topological space of maximal configurations of quotient event structures. We introduce the compression of event structures as an example of quotient: the compression of an event structure E is a minimal event structure with the same space of maximal configurations as E.

scholarly journals Change of state in Kinyarwanda: A study in root meaning

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Kyle Jerro
Keyword(s):  
Result State ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Verb Meaning

I investigate the paradigms of change of state verb roots in Kinyarwanda, comparing the simple state, inchoative, causative, and result state members of 81 root paradigms. I show that the morphological shape of the causative/inchoative members of the paradigm and whether there is a simple state term are both contingent upon root semantics. Certain change of state roots in Kinyarwanda lack simple state meanings and always give rise to change entailments; this correlates with the lack of the simple state in the paradigm. I further show that verb meaning also partially determines which of several derivational strategies are used by a given change of state paradigm. 

scholarly journals Adverbial Quantification and Event Structures

1991 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara H. Partee
Keyword(s):  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Event Structure ◽  
General Session ◽  
Event Structures

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 439-456

Thinking Through Secrets: Rethinking the Role of Thought Suppression in Secrecy

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (10) ◽  
pp. 1411-1427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael L. Slepian ◽  
Katharine H. Greenaway ◽  
E. J. Masicampo
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Common View ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Temporal Focus ◽  
Ironic Process ◽  
The Relationship

Having secrets on the mind is associated with lower well-being, and a common view of secrets is that people work to suppress and avoid them—but might people actually want to think about their secrets? Four studies examining more than 11,000 real-world secrets found that the answer depends on the importance of the secret: People generally seek to engage with thoughts of significant secrets and seek to suppress thoughts of trivial secrets. Inconsistent with an ironic process account, adopting the strategy to suppress thoughts of a secret was not related to a tendency to think about the secret. Instead, adopting the strategy to engage with thoughts of a secret was related the tendency to think about the secret. Moreover, the temporal focus of one’s thoughts moderated the relationship between mind-wandering to the secret and well-being, with a focus on the past exacerbating a harmful link. These results suggest that people do not universally seek to suppress their secrets; they also seek to engage with them, although not always effectively.

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