Beth Levin, Northwestern University

Two Facets of Verb Meaning: The Structural and The Idiosyncratic

Many researchers in lexical semantics either implicitly or explicitly
make a distinction between two aspects of verb meaning, which I term the
"structural" and the "idiosyncratic" (Grimshaw 1993; Hale and Keyser
1993; Jackendoff 1990, 1996; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1995, in press;
Pinker 1989; among others).  The structural aspects of verb meaning are
those that define various ontological types of events.  They are also
said to be the grammatically-relevant aspects; they define the semantic
classes of verbs whose members share syntactically- and
morphologically-salient properties.  In contrast, the idiosyncratic
facets of verb meaning serve to differentiate a verb from other verbs
sharing the same structural aspects of meaning.  In this talk, I will
examine evidence for distinguishing these two facets of verb meaning.  I
will then discuss the relationship between them, as it has barely been
investigated in previous studies, and I will propose that the
idiosyncratic components constrain the structural components.

Background Paper:  Building Verb Meaning.  For URL, go to 

http://www.ling.nwu.edu
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