This volume presents new work by leading researchers on central themes in the study of event structure: the nature and representation of telicity, change, and the notion of state. The book advances our understanding of these aspects of event structure by combining foundational semantic research with a series of case studies from a variety of languages. The book begins with an overview of the theoretical issues central to the volume, along with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters and the points of contact between them. The chapters, developed within several different theoretical perspectives, promote cross-theory as well as cross-linguistic comparison. The work will interest scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition who are interested in the notions of telicity, change, and stativity.

In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning. The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments. The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part. Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references. The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory. Easy to use, English Verb Classes and Alternations sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language.

The author combines a syntax-theoretical treatment of telicity marking and an empirical study of the second language acquisition of English telicity marking by native speakers of Bulgarian, a Slavic language. It is argued that Vendler’s lexical classes of verbs (states, activities, accomplishments and achievements) can be represented in four phrase structure templates, where lexical properties of the verb and of the object compositionally determine telicity. A parameterized distinction between English and Slavic aspect is proposed. The book addresses two major acquisition issues: (1) what is the nature of the initial hypothesis Bulgarian learners of English entertain regarding telicity marking (i.e., is there native language transfer)? (2) are adult learners capable of resetting the telicity marking parameter? Both L1 transfer and parameter resetting are experimentally supported. In addition, the study investigates the L2 acquisition of a cluster of complex predicate constructions, purportedly related to the telicity parameter in the grammatical competence and in child language acquisition of English.

Τhis book offers a new approach to the theory of change in argument structure and voice morphology. It investigates the diachrony of transitivity, and especially the changes in causative verbs and transitivity alternations, based on data mainly from the Greek and English diachrony (all historical data are transcribed and accompanied by glosses and translations into Modern English). Data from earlier periods provide new information on burning questions in both Historical and Theoretical Linguistics. The study shows that (a) causativisations are the result of reanalysis of intransitive verbs as transitive on the basis of the linguistic cue of Case; (b) the changes in voice morphology do not depend on the derivation and direction of new transitivity alternations. Finally, the study demonstrates that the generalisation that guides the changes in voice demands morphological differentiation of the anticausative from the passive types.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume offers a variety of perspectives on two of the main topics situated at the crossroads between lexical semantics and syntax, namely: (a) aspect and its correspondence with syntactic structure; and (b) the delimitation of syntactic structures from verb classes. Almost from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it has been assumed that verbs invoke a mental image about the way in which eventualities are distributed over time. When it comes to determining time schemata, the lexical class to which the verb belongs represents a first step. Speaking about verb classes does not exclusively mean a semantic similarity; rather, verb classes exhibit a bundle of common features and thus show a set of recursive behavior patterns. Beyond the meaning of the verb, both semantic and syntactic factors, together with pragmatic ones, play a decisive role when establishing the aspectual classification of an eventuality. The contributions collected in this book approach the aforementioned lines, either analyzing the relationships between aspect and syntactic structure or traversing the path from a verb class to its syntactic manifestation. Some of them stress diachronic filiations, while others include processes of word formation in the debate; some of them focus on certain classes, such as movement verbs or psychological verbs, while others examine specific constructions. A number of chapters also discuss relevant theoretical issues concerning the analysis of aspect. In sum, the kaleidoscopic view provided by this book allows the reader to delve deeper into one of the most controversial – as well as exciting – topics within current linguistics.

This book offers a new account of the transitive particle verb construction in English. The main emphasis is on the alternation between the two word orders possible in English (continuous: hand in the manuscript vs. discontinuous: hand the manuscript in). The central aim is to show that the choice of the word order is not optional as has often been claimed in related literature on the topic and that a syntactic analysis should thus not be based on optional movement operations or optional feature selection. The author argues in some detail that the choice of the word order is determined to a great extent by the information structuring of the context in which the relevant construction is embedded. The syntactic structure she develops is based on a substantial combination of empirical facts, evidence from theoretical research and the results of two experimental studies on the intonation patterns of the construction.