Spanish change of state verbs in composition with atypical theme arguments: Clarifying the meaning shifts

What words mean and express: semantics and pragmatics of kind terms and verbs

“…Spalek (2015), for instance, proposes that the lexical meaning of the Spanish verb 'cortar' (roughly, but not exactly, equivalent to 'cut') 22 encodes a change of state in which an entity which exemplifies some kind of connectedness undergoes a process of controlled disconnection. This kind of abstract meaning would be the common core present in the uses of 'cortar', both in the more "literal" and in the more "figurative" ones (like 'cortar la circulación'/stop the traffic).…”

Polysemy and word meaning: an account of lexical meaning for different kinds of content words

“…The common core of, e.g. the different senses of the verb cut could be "change of state in which an entity which exemplifies some kind of connectedness undergoes a process of controlled disconnection" (Spalek, 2015). Whenever a reader finds the word cut in a text, she activates that common core representation.…”

“…It is now well-attested that alleged semantic features of verbs such as aspectuality (whether they denote states, activities, accomplishments, or achievements) and the possibility of certain argument alternations, are rather features of whole VPs (for aspectuality, Dowty, 1979;for argument alternations, Rappaport Hovav, 2014 (Falkum, 2011) 4 . Thus, it seems that the different senses of verbs are generated or retrieved (depending on the level of conventionalization) in composition, and in particular, that they partly depend on the internal argument verbs they take (see Spalek, 2015, for a development). The lexical meaning of cut can be very abstract, so that it covers both uses of cut in cut the grass and cut the interest rates.…”

“…The lexical meaning of cut can be very abstract, so that it covers both uses of cut in cut the grass and cut the interest rates. Spalek (2015), for instance, proposes that the lexical meaning of the Spanish verb cortar (roughly, but not exactly, equivalent to cut) 5 encodes a change of state in which an entity which exemplifies some kind of connectedness undergoes a process of controlled disconnection 6 . This kind of abstract meaning could be the common core present in all uses of cortar, both in its more "literal" and in the more figurative uses (like cortar la circulación/stop the traffic).…”

Polysemous Posture in English: A Case Study of Non-literal Meaning

“…The methodology for the qualitative corpus study was created after Spalek (2014Spalek ( , 2015, whose work also examined the non-literal use of polysemous verbs. Namely, I extracted sentences from the magazine and news categories in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).…”