In Motion and the English Verb, a study of the expression of motion in medieval English, Judith Huber provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English, and discusses these in terms of the manner-salience of early English. Huber demonstrates how several non-motion verbs receive contextual motion meanings through their use in the intransitive motion construction. In addition, she analyzes which verbs and structures are employed most frequently in talking about motion in select Old and Middle English texts, demonstrating that while satellite-framing is stable, the extent of manner-conflation is influenced by text type and style. Huber further investigates how in the intertypological contact with medieval French, a range of French path verbs (entrer, issir, descendre, etc.) were incorporated into Middle English, in whose system of motion encoding they are semantically unusual. Their integration into Middle English is studied in an innovative approach which analyzes their usage contexts in autonomous Middle English texts as opposed to translations from French and Latin. Huber explains how these verbs were initially borrowed not for expressing general literal motion, but in more specific, often metaphorical and abstract contexts. Her study is a diachronic contribution to the typology of motion encoding, and advances research on the process of borrowing and loanword integration.

While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research, the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights from Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar. On this approach, verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs, frame-semantics, and constructions, and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions. This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs, revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally, a range of contrastive (German–English) analyses demonstrate how verb classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions.

The Semantics of German Verb Prefixes is the most comprehensive study ever undertaken in this area of German grammar. Using an extensive collection of naturally occurring data, the author proposes an image-schematic interpretation for each of the productive prefixes be-, ver-, er-, ent-, zer-, um-, über-, unter-, and durch-. These abstract semantic patterns underlie a remarkable range of particular meanings, and they consistently account for subtle contrasts between prefixed verbs and alternative constructions such as simple verbs, particle verbs, and verbs with other prefixes. Furthermore, the author develops a schematic meaning for the prefixed verb construction itself. This grammatical meaning reflects the interpreter’s perspective and attentional focus as the objective event is imagined to unfold. Underlying all of these proposals is a novel conception of meaning as a dynamic and flexible process with a constantly active role for the interpreter. This volume will be of great value to cognitive linguists as well as scholars and students of German who want to gain insights into a central and puzzling part of the morphosyntax and semantics of the German language.

This is really two books in one: a valuable reference resource, and a groundbreaking case study that represents a new approach to constructional semantics. It presents a detailed descriptive survey, using extensive examples collected from the Internet, of German verb constructions in which the expressions durch ('through'), über ('over'), unter ('under'), and um ('around') occur either as inseparable verb prefixes or as separable verb particles. Based on that evidence, the author argues that the prefixed verb constructions and particle verb constructions themselves have meaning, and that this meaning involves subjective construal processes rather than objective information. The constructions prompt us to distribute focal attention according to patterns that can be articulated in terms of Talmy's notion of “perspectival modes”. Among the other topics that play an important role in the analysis are incremental themes, reflexive trajectors, fictive motion, “multi-directional paths”, and “accusative landmarks”.

This Handbook is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible guide to the topics and theories that current form the front line of research into tense, aspect, and related areas.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Hamburg (Anglistik), course: Contrastive analysis of English and German, 32 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: An extensive number of studies deal with perception verbs and their complementation in English or in German but so far no study found, analyses the two languages with respect to perception verbs contrastively. This paper shall provide the basis for a contrastive analysis of perception verbs and their complements in English and German. The goal is to contribute to the comparative typological study of the two languages as well as to the typological study of perception verbs and perception verb complements cross-linguistically.