scholarly journals Derivational Productivity in the Urdu Motion Verbs’ Causative Alternation

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (II) ◽  
pp. 444-459
Author(s):  
Ahmad Naveed
Author(s):  
Judith Huber

Chapter 6 begins with an overview of the language contact situation with (Anglo-) French and Latin, resulting in large-scale borrowing in the Middle English period. The analysis of 465 Middle English verbs used to express intransitive motion shows that there are far more French/Latin loans in the path verbs than in the other motion verbs. The range of (new) manner of motion verbs testifies to the manner salience of Middle English: caused motion verbs are also found in intransitive motion meanings, as are French loans which do not have motion uses in continental French. Their motion uses in Anglo-Norman are discussed in terms of contact influence of Middle English. The analysis of motion expression in different texts yields a picture similar to the situation in Old English, with path typically expressed in satellites, and neutral as well as manner of motion verbs being most frequent, depending on text type.


Author(s):  
Judith Huber

Chapter 2 provides an introduction to the motion encoding typology as proposed by Talmy, Slobin, and others (manner- and path-conflating languages, different types of framing and their concomitant characteristics). It argues that this typology is highly compatible with a construction grammar framework, points out the differences, and shows that particularly from the diachronic perspective taken in this study, the constructionist approach has advantages over the originally lexicalist approach of the motion typology. The chapter also provides a discussion of the different categories of motion verbs used in this study (manner verbs, path verbs, neutral motion verbs, and verbs that do not evoke a motion event on their own, but can receive a contextual motion reading).


2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natsuko Tsujimura

Kita (1999) compares Japanese and English Enter/Exit verbs in spatial expressions, and argues that Japanese Enter/Exit verbs lack semantic encoding of motion. He claims that this runs counter to the view which considers motion and location to be primitives in the semantics of spatial expressions; instead, he proposes that discrete change of state should be included in the set of primitives. In this reply,I will first show that Kita’s evidence does not support lack of motion in Japanese Enter/Exit verbs, but that instead these verbs do pattern with motion verbs in the language, where conflation of motion is not disputable. I finally demonstrate that Kita’s claim about change of state may be well taken, but it should be put in a larger context of regular polysemy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Romain

Abstract This paper shows that low-level generalisations in argument structure constructions are crucial to understanding the concept of alternation: low-level generalisations inform and constrain more schematic generalisations and thus constructional meaning. On the basis of an analysis of the causative alternation in English, and more specifically of the theme (i.e., the entity undergoing the event denoted by the verb), I show that each construction has its own schematic meaning. This analysis is conducted on a dataset composed of 11,554 instances of the intransitive non-causative construction and the transitive causative construction. The identification of lower-level generalisations feeds into the idea that language acquisition is organic and abstractions are formed only gradually (if at all) from exposure to input. So far, most of the literature on argument structure constructions has focused on the verb itself, and thus fails to capture these generalisations. I make up for this deficit through an in-depth analysis of the causative alternation.


Author(s):  
Remus Gergel ◽  
Martin Kopf-Giammanco

Abstract The goal of this article is to diagnose a verbal construction which has made it to common use in Austrian German and is typically unknown to many speakers of Federal German who have not been exposed to Austrian German. This construction is based on the verb gehen (‘go’) conjoined by a particle and the reflexive. An argument for its analysis as a degree-based sufficiency construction is developed, which is constructed by extending existing approaches in the literature on enough constructions and suggesting a meaning of the construction at hand, which is presuppositional in multiple respects. The results of diachronic corpus searches as well as the significance of the results of this work for the space of possibilities of the semantic change of motion verbs are discussed.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maaike Beliën,

AbstractDutch manner of motion verbs play a prominent role in the literature on unaccusativity. As these verbs can take both hebben ‘have’ and zijn ‘be’ as their perfective auxiliaries, they are considered to show both unergative and unaccusative behavior. The general consensus is that these verbs normally take hebben, yet occur with zijn if they are ‘telicized’ by an endpoint, and that the auxiliaries are diagnostics for the syntactic status of prepositional phrases (PPs). The paper presents attested data that reveal that this generalization is untenable: there are examples that take the opposite auxiliary from what the generalization predicts. To account for the full set of data, the paper takes a cognitive-grammar perspective, arguing that auxiliary choice, telicity and syntactic status of PPs are independent issues requiring their own explanations. Auxiliary choice is analyzed in terms of alternate construals of a motion event: with hebben as a type of act and with zijn as a change of location. In this manner, the paper adds to a growing body of literature that questions the usefulness of the coarse unergative–unaccusative distinction, advocating a ‘local analysis’ instead.


2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Skopeteas

AbstractClassical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.


2007 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tore Nesset

This paper investigates the path image schema in Russian motion verbs. It is argued that this image schema provides a principled explanation why Russian has a contrast between unidirectional and non-directional unprefixed motion verbs, but no such contrast for prefixed verbs.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. p61
Author(s):  
Anna Dabrowska

The paper addresses the issue of the unaccusative-unergative dichotomy of predicates, providing a special analysis of the class status of the verb “to die” in English. First, the article opens with a view of unaccusativity in the light of the Lexicon-Syntax Interface. Further, the verb “to die” is tested against the six syntactic unaccusativity diagnostics valid for English. The results obtain reveal the fact that the first three diagnostics (auxiliary selection, causative alternation and resultative constructions) do not work for the verb “to die”, while the last three diagnostics (adjectival participle, there-insertion, locative inversion) appear to have been satisfied. This would lead us to a conclusion that the verb “to die” should be considered as a real example of an Unaccusative Mismatch (Levin, 1986).


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