Verb Meaning and the Lexicon
A First Phase Syntax

This book examines the relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences.

Gillian Catriona Ramchand (Author)

9780521182348, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 February 2011

228 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 12.2 cm, 0.31 kg

The relationship between the meaning of words and the structure of sentences is an important area of research in linguistics. Studying the connections between lexical conceptual meaning and event structural relations, this book arrives at a modular classification of verb types within English and across languages. Ramchand argues that lexical encyclopedic content and event structural aspects of meaning need to be systematically distinguished, and that thematic and aspectual relations belong to the latter domain of meaning. The book proposes a syntactic decompositional view of core verbal meaning, and sets out to account for the variability and systematicity of argument structure realisation across verb types. It also proposes an interesting view of lexical insertion.

1. Introduction
2. The empirical ground
3. A first phase syntax
4. Deriving verb classes
5. Paths and results
6. Causativization
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Linguistics [CF]