John Beavers

• PhD
• University of Texas at Austin

Chapter 3 examines English ditransitive verbs, which show the dative alternation between indirect object and to frames, each supposedly reflecting a different template for a single manner-describing root. It shows that these two templates are semantically highly underspecified, and it is the root that fleshes out many of the surface verb’s basic en...

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...

Chapter 4 explores the question of Manner/Result Complementarity. It proposes that there are systematic verb classes that entail both meanings at once, including verbs of manner of killing, cooking, and ballistic motion, demonstrated by applying various diagnostics for manner and result in a verb’s meaning and showing that certain verb classes pass...

Chapter 5 summarizes and synthesizes the results of the overall study. The deeper motivation for why roots would not be subject to constraints such as those required by Bifurcation and Manner/Result Complementarity is explored, whereby the semantic specificity of idiosyncratic root meanings may in some cases require also entailing more basic templa...

Chapter 2 examines the semantic and morphological predictions of Bifurcation, focusing on the roots of change-of-state verbs and their stative correlates. Using evidence from entailment, morphology, and sublexical modification it shows that English verbal roots fall into two classes. The flat class describe simple states, while the crack class desc...

This paper investigates the interpretations of caused change-of-state predicates in Korean, and in particular non-culmination readings in which the result state inherent to the meaning of the predicate fails to obtain either fully (zero result) or partially. We argue that zero result readings require that the subject intended the coming about of th...

Cambridge Core - Research Methods in Linguistics - edited by Robert J. Podesva

Research Methods in Linguistics - edited by Robert J. Podesva January 2014

In this article we consider the nature of ‘result verbs’, typically defined as verbs describing scalar changes, which have played a significant role in the literature on verb typologies, event structures, and theories of (im)possible word meanings. We argue that the entailment of scalar change and the entailment of a new result state should not be...

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 argu...

We respond to Horvath and Siloni's (2013) continued arguments against the reflexivization analysis of anticausatives, which we show suffer many of the same problems Beavers and Koontz-Garboden (2013) identified with the arguments in Horvath and Siloni (2011).

Horvath and Siloni (2011) argue against an analysis of anticausativization as reflexivization as presented especially by Koontz-Garboden (2009) for languages in which anticausatives exhibit overt reflexive marking. We show that Horvath and Siloni's evidence, when examined in greater detail, either does not argue against such an analysis, or in some...

Aspectual properties of dynamic predicates such as telicity and durativity are often assumed to be partly determined by the expression of some privileged argument of the predicate called an 'incremental theme' where the progress of the event described by the predicate is measured by parts of the incremental theme. The chapter provides evidence that...

Affectedness—usually construed as a persistent change in or impingement of an event participant—has been implicated in argument realization, lexical aspect, transitivity, and various syntactic operations. However, it is rarely given a precise, independently-motivated definition. Rather, it is often defined intuitively or diacritically, or reduced t...

Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2010) argue that verbs fall into (at least) two classes: those encoding result (e.g. break) and those encoding manner (e.g. run). No verb en-codes both manner and result simultaneously. Although their claim is about the truth conditional content associated with particular verbs, they explain the complementarity by appeali...

: This article explores the architecture of the interface between morphosyntax and lexical semantics, in particular the semantic underpinnings of argument realization. Many theories of lexical meaning assume that argument realization is derived from underlying event structure: the relative prominence of coarguments in a clause follows from their re...

We examine Spanish dative alternations, and argue that although there are parallels to English, Harley's (2003) analysis of English cannot be extended to Spanish, contra Bleam (2001). We propose an alternative based on the Morphosyntactic Alignment Principle of Beavers (2006), wherein the thematic role of the dative argument is a truth conditional...

Verbs like get, give, and transitive want incorporate a possession component, and hence receive paraphrases that include the verb have as given in (1): (1) a. John wants the car. ↔ John wants to have the car. b. John got the car. ↔ John came to have the car.

This paper provides a new perspective on the options available to languages for encoding directed motion events. Talmy (2000) introduces an influential two-way typology, proposing that languages adopt either verb- or satellite-framed encoding of motion events. This typology is augmented by Slobin (2004b) and Zlatev & Yangklang (2004) with a third c...

In this paper I examine ditransitive verbs that can describe caused possession (e.g. give, throw, send) by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proven fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)transitive...

In this paper I outline a theory of aspectual classes based on theories of scalar change (Hay et al. 1999, Kennedy and Levin 2008). Standard mod-els of aspectual classes focus on event decompositional or featural distinc-tions between predicates. However, such classifications often over-or under-generate, and also do not necessarily capture the tem...

Many recent theories of causative/inchoative alternations adopt an anti-causativization analysis, wherein the inchoative is derived from the causative via some operation that eliminates the causer argument from a verb's argument structure, provided the causer is semantically unspecified for agentivity (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995; Chierchia 2004...

The Sinhala volitive/involitive contrast is characterize d by verb stem and subject case marking alternations, and broadly indicates the voli- tionality/non-volitionality of the subject, plus other co -varying fea- tures. While superficially a high/low transitivity splita la Hopper and Thompson (1980), we argue that the distinction actually emerges...

In this paper I examine the types of events associated with ditransitive verbs that describe caused possession by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proven fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)tran...

Introduction I examine the interaction of causation and affectedness in deter-mining the transitivity, and propose a restricted system for classi-fying verbs in terms of how these properties are distributed across arguments that relies crucially on force-dynamic structure.

1. Introduction This paper examines argument/oblique alternations, where a semantic argument of a predicate may be morphosyntactically realized either as a direct argument (e.g subject or object) or as an oblique. The conative alternation in (1) is an example. (1) a. Kim cut the pie. b. Kim cut at the pie. In (1a) the patient the pie is realized as...

This paper investigates two ways goals of motion events can be expressed in so-called ‘verb-framed’ languages (Talmy 2000), focusing on the Japanese postpositions -made and -ni. It is typically assumed that these postpositions are both goal-markers, but differ in the exact goal semantics they encode, giving rise to non-overlapping distributions. Ba...

Introduction Typically, broad-coverage precision grammars are based on grammat- icality judgment data and syntactic intuition, and corpus data is relegated to secondary status in guiding lexicon and grammar development. On the other end of the scale, shallow grammars are often induced directly from treebank data and make little or no use of grammat...

In this paper I outline Type-inheritance Combi-natory Categorial Grammar (TCCG), an imple-mented feature structure based CCG fragment of English. TCCG combines the fully lexical nature of CCG with the type-inheritance hierar-chies and complex feature structures of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammars (HPSG). The result is a CCG/HPSG hybrid that co...

Abstract Within the tradition of Categorial Grammar, so-called ‘non-constituent’ coordination (‘argument,cluster’ coordination and ‘right node raising’) has been analyzed in terms of the coordination of nonstandard constituents pro- duced by the operations of type raising and composition. This highly suc- cessful research has expanded the domain of...

Motion Resultatives, and change-of-state predicates in general, are often metaphorically analyzed in terms of "movement" along paths (Gruber, 1965, Jackendoff, 1976, 1983, 1996, Krifka, 1998, Talmy, 2000). Specifically this can be done by positing path arguments and MRs for all verbs of (potential) change-of-state. Non-motion change of state verbs...

This paper serves as documentation to a unification-based implementation of a Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) of the fragment of English described in Sag and Wasow (1999). The implementation of this grammar was done in the Type Description Language (TDL) using the Linguistic Knowledge Building (LKB) grammar development system, both of which we...

This paper examines Determinerless PPs in English from a theoretical perspective. We classify attested P + N combinations across a number of analytic dimensions, arguing that the observed cases fall into at least three distinct classes. We then survey three different analytic methods that can predict the behaviour of the differing classes and exami...

Japanese has three purported goal-marking postpositions, -ni and -e on the one hand and -made on the other, where -ni/e only occur with "motion+path" predicates while -made occurs with all motion predicates, including "motion+manner" predicates. Previous analyses assumed that all of these postpositions are contributing goal semantics and that the d...

MotionResultatives, and change-of-state predicates in general, are often metaphorically analyzedin terms of "movement" along paths (Gruber, 1965, Jackendoff, 1976, 1983, 1996, Krifka,1998, Talmy, 2000). Specifically this can be done by positing path arguments and MRs forall verbs of (potential) change-of-state. Non-motion change of state verbs (e.g...

This paper provides a new perspective on the options available to languages for encoding directed motion events. Talmy (2000) introduces an influential two-way typology, proposing that languages adopt either verb-or satellite-framed encoding of motion events. This typology is augmented by Slobin (2004b) and Zlatev & Yangklang (2004) with a third cl...

Much literature in syntax has assumed that all noun phrases are categorically headed by the determiner or the noun, with well-formedness categorial in nature. In this paper I develop a theory of noun phrase structure in which both categories project noun phrases, arguing that this better fits the indeterminacy of the criteria often cited for determ...

I examine the semantic contrasts exhibited by argument/oblique alternations (argument realization alternations where one or more participants may be realized either as a direct argument or an oblique). Previous HPSG accounts of these have proposed that alternating verbs are ambiguous, where each variant has a structured semantics that makes differe...