Grammatically relevant aspects of meaning and verbal polysemy

Abstract

The debate over the relation between grammatically relevant (specifically, what we term event referential) and idiosyncratic aspects of verb meaning has produced a considerable literature. Some authors, such as Levin and Rappaport Hovav, have appealed to figurative uses of verbs as a source of data when the analysis of their literal uses has been controversial, a move that has sometimes been criticized. However, the question of whether figurative uses of verbs preserve the event referential properties of their literal counterparts and are therefore a valid source of data has not, to our knowledge, been systematically explored. We offer two detailed cross-linguistic case studies of Spanish and English verbs to provide an argument that figurative verb uses indeed are a reliable source of evidence for identifying event referential components of meaning: In each case study we find clear evidence for the preservation of these components across uses, indicating that these aspects of meaning both constrain and facilitate figurative uses of verbs.

Internally caused change as change by inner predisposition: Comparative evidence from Romance

“…7 We examined the range of transitive subjects occurring with the verbs that were found to alternate, and we compared the meanings of the verbs when transitive and intransitive. Following McNally & Spalek (2022), we included in the investigation the metaphorical or extended meanings of the verbs, assuming that grammatically relevant aspects of meaning can be carried over in figurative polysemy. The consideration of this evidence shed light on important aspects of the analysis, including the notion of dual classification ( §4.1).…”

On the argument structure realization of result verbs: A syntactic approach

“…SeeMcNally & Spalek (2022) for similar examples of non-selected object constructions with cut, a verb that has been argued to be polysemous between manner and result(Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2013).4See alsoAcedo-Matellán & Mateu (2014) for remarks on this point.Acta Linguistica Academica 70 (2023) 1, 139-160…”