Abstract. 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.
What are the basic building blocks of verb meanings, how are they composed into more complex meanings, and how does this explain the grammatical properties of verbs and their relationships to other words with related meanings? These questions are fundamental to the study of verb meaning, and some of the most fruitful attempts to answer them have come from event-structural theories, wherein verb meanings are assumed to be decomposed into an event template, which captures the verb's broad temporal and causal contours, and an idiosyncratic root shared across templates, which describes specific actions and states for a given verb. An open question is what the division of labor is between the template and the root in a given verb's event template, and whether their meanings are bifurcated: are broad eventive lexical entailments introduced only by the templates, never the idiosyncratic roots? Since event templates and not roots are the primary semantic correlates of a verb's grammatical properties, bifurcation would make strong predictions about the correlation of a verb's broad temporal and causal semantics and its syntax and morphology. We argue against this bifurcation by comparing translation equivalents of Levin's (1993) nondeadjectival vs. deadjectival change-of-state verb roots in English (e.g. result vs. property concept roots) across languages. A broad-scale typological study reveals that property concept roots tend to have unmarked stative forms and marked verbal forms, while result roots have the opposite pattern. Semantic studies of several languages confirm that terms built on result roots always entail change, while terms based on property concept roots do not. This supports a theory wherein result roots entail change independent of the template, contra bifurcation. This supports a more complex, albeit still principled, theory of possible event-structural meaning and its grammatical correlates, one that takes subclasses of roots into account, while showing the value of this type of crosslinguistic methodology for testing the predictions of event-structural approaches.*
Previous research has noted that verbal suppletion for ergative number agreement (i.e. agreement with the subjects of intransitives and the objects of transitives) is widespread throughout the Uto-Aztecan language family and is therefore reconstructable to Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) (Langacker, 1977). However, no previous works have systematically surveyed the attested forms of suppletion in these languages nor posited specific proposals for reconstructions of particular suppletive morphs back to PUA. We redress this lacuna by surveying the suppletive verbs in the various subgroups of Uto-Aztecan and assessing which of those are sufficiently widespread to reconstruct to PUA. We argue for specific PUA reconstructions for two verbal domains: die and kill, arguing that there were three distinct suppletive verb stems for marking these functions: *muku die.sg, *ko(i) die.pl, and *mɨɁa kill.sg. The plural form of kill in PUA was derived by adding a causative suffix *-ya to the plural stem for die, yielding *ko-ya. Other suppletive verbs in the family are not as easily reconstructable to PUA due to variation in attested forms, although some semantic functions seem to be widespread enough to be reconstructable. The PUA forms serving those functions would have been altered in different ways at different times by a lexical replacement process endemic to cases of strong suppletion, i.e. incursion (Juge, 2000). We also consider the issue of potential areal contact involving suppletion patterns in the areas where Uto-Aztecan languages are spoken, finding limited but suggestive evidence for possible areal effects involving suppletion for verbal number agreement.
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