31.1605, Books: The Roots of Verbal Meaning: Beavers, Koontz-Garboden

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1605. Wed May 13 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.1605, Books: The Roots of Verbal Meaning: Beavers, Koontz-Garboden

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Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 16:31:36
From:  Oxford University Press [HumanitiesMarketing at oup.com]
Subject: The Roots of Verbal Meaning: Beavers, Koontz-Garboden

 


Title: The Roots of Verbal Meaning 
Series Title: Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics  

Publication Year: 2020 
Publisher: Oxford University Press
	   http://www.oup.com/us
	

Book URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-roots-of-verbal-meaning-9780198855781?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics 


Author: John Beavers
Author: Andrew Koontz-Garboden

Hardback: ISBN:  9780198855781 Pages: 288 Price: U.S. $ 85.00


Abstract:

This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific
focus on the meanings of verbs. John Beavers and Andrew Koontz-Garboden adopt
the now common view that verb meanings consist at least partly of an event
structure, made up of two elements: an event template describing the verb's
broad temporal and causal contours, which occurs across lots of verbs and
groups them into semantic and grammatical classes; and an idiosyncratic root
describing specific, real world states and actions that distinguish between
verbs with the same template. While much work has focused on templates, less
work has addressed the truth-conditional contributions of roots, despite the
importance of a theory of root meaning in fully defining the predictions made
by event structural approaches. This book aims to address this gap by
exploring two previously proposed constraints on root meaning: The Bifurcation
Thesis of Roots, whereby roots never introduce the meanings introduced by
templates, and Manner/Result Complementarity, which specifies that roots can
describe either a manner or a result state but never both at the same time.
Two extended case studies, on change-of-state verbs and ditransitive verbs of
caused possession, show that neither hypothesis holds, and that ultimately
there may be no constraints on what a root can mean. Nonetheless, the book
argues that event structures still have predictive value: it presents a new
theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates
that produces a new typology of possible verbs, in which systematic semantic
and grammatical properties are determined not just by templates, but also by
roots.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories
                     Morphology
                     Semantics
                     Syntax


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=141676




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