The Roots of Verbal Meaning

concepts or bundles of concepts that only take on anything like a truth conditional meaning within a particular event structure. Thus we focus on the contributions of templatic heads and roots in particular event structures, by focusing on single senses of the surface words they correspond to. For templatic heads the universal consensus is as above, namely that their meanings are basic, universal non-logical constants such as cause′ and become′ defining broad temporal and causal eventive properties. But with roots the overwhelming view is that they introduce idiosyncratic content that somehow fills in specific event details. However, there have been few explicit proposals about what sorts of lexical entailments these can give rise to among the set of lexical entailments associated with an entire event structure. The degree to which this is true it is a significant lacuna in the study of event structural meaning. As Dowty (1979: 125–6) makes very clear, if a goal of an event structural approach is to make testable predictions about possible and impossible verb meanings, no matter how confident we are about templatic meanings if there are no constraints on the root meanings such that roots can mean anything then so can the verbs they give rise to. Fleshing out a theory of root meaning is thus important in fully realizing the predictive power of event structural approaches. (See Williams 2015: 216–8 for a recent reiteration of exactly this point and the need for work on this topic.) One difficulty in studying rootmeaning is deducingwhat the event template and the root for a given verb or set of verbs (or other such word categories) are and then finding out what the contribution of each element is. Fortunately, the logic of event structural approaches gives us ways to probe root meanings. One way to hone in on rootmeaning is through the use of sublexical modifiers such as again in §1.3. 2, which can be used in some cases to isolate a root in a given event structure. Furthermore, paradigmatic relationships between surface forms can give us a clue as to root meaning. By default, if we can identify a specific verb class with a welldelineated set of grammatical and semantic properties then we can take what is common semantically across all of the verbs in this class to reflect the contribution of the event template. Any other meaning in any specific verb must therefore be contributed by the root. Of course, when looking across morphological roots in a template there is the possibilitymentioned above of templatic polysemy. To control for this the case studies we address in this book—(caused) change-of-state verbs and their associated adjectival forms plus ditransitive verbs of caused possession in the dative alternation—are such that it is commonly assumed that a single template or set of templates unites each one, so we generally set this possibility aside unless otherwise noted. Additionally, by default, if we can identify a single morphological root and look at its uses across a range of distinct grammatical contexts assumed to correspond to distinct templates, anymeaning common across all such usagesmust come from the root, factoring out known templaticmeaning and provided other roots in those contexts do not give rise to this meaning. Of course, when looking across different OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/2/2020, SPi 1.4 hypotheses about root meaning 25 templates at the samemorphological roots there is the possibilitymentioned above of lexical semantic root polysemy. However, we generally avoid positing such polysemy unless there is very good reason to, e.g. a meaning difference for a single morphological root across templates that seems difficult or impossible to capture assuming a shared root meaning. For most such comparisons we are interested in (change-of-state verbs and their related adjectives, transitive and ditransitive verbs across argument alternations that reflect distinct templates) there is rarely any reason to assume this.11 A combination of these three methodologies will give us the tools we need to ascertain what a root contributes to a given verb’s meaning, and we can thus begin to identify possible constraints on root meaning. This does all assume that a root actually has an isolatable meaning, and we do indeed make the straightforward default assumption that in event structures such as the ones we have in (21) each terminal has a meaning such as those discussed in §1.3. 2 and that the meaning of the full structure is derived compositionally. This is not meant, though, to preclude that in the case of surface lexical idiosyncrasy or idioms (especially phrasal idioms like kick the bucket) that a unit larger than a terminal node may have an idiosyncratic, non-compositional meaning. But we assume that the default, regular case is compositional meaning, and in that case roots are assigned meanings themselves and the interpretation of the entire event structure is fully compositional. That said, even on approaches that do not make this assumption the kinds of questions we wish to address about what a possible root meaning is still arise. For example, Borer (2013: 403–17, 436–70) argues that roots are contentless phonological indices, and content only arises for a root plus some additional grammatical context X, minimally a root plus a category label it takes on in context. But optionally a (categorized) root plus additional heads it has Merged with can instead take on a single non-compositional meaning as a unit (up to the point of the introduction of an extended projection, e.g. the introduction of arguments). However, for a given grammatical context X, barring lexical idiosyncrasy or idiomaticity, for all roots in X the standard assumption is that there should be some shared meaning between them that correlates with X, and the residue left by ignoring that meaning correlates with the root. In this case we can still ask questions about what kinds of meanings distinguish root+X combinations for different roots. 11 An example of where we might posit polysemy is the case of the root of the verb hand that we discuss in Chapter 3, which we argue entails the templatic notions of motion and possession. But as Alec Marantz (p.c.) points out the nominal hand as in John raised his hand lacks any such entailments. However, given that the nominal hand requires none of what verbal hand requires and vice versa (e.g. it is not contradictory to say John handed Mary a towel with a pair of tongs) we assume that the two uses of hand are not synchronically derived from the same underlying root with a single denotation, though presumably there is an historical relationship between them. This position, and the facts tied to hand, are reminiscent of observations made in relation to locatum and location verbs by Kiparsky (1997: 485–91). In general, nominal forms of the roots we study here are an interesting potential source of further data, but for now we restrict our study mostly to verbs and some adjectives. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/2/2020, SPi