This paper explores an understudied and poorly understood phenomenon of morphological syncretism in which a morpheme otherwise used to mark the head of a possessive NP appears on words naming property concept (PC) states (states named by adjectives in languages with that lexical category; Dixon, Where have all the adjectives gone? And other essays in Semantics and Syntax, 1982) in predicative and attributive contexts. This phenomenon is found across a variety of unrelated languages. We examine its manifestation in Ulwa, an (...) endangered Misumalpan language of Nicaragua, where diachronic evidence clearly shows that a single affix is involved. We propose an explanation for the syncretism based on an explicit syntactic and semantic analysis of the relevant constructions. On the proposed explanation, the syncretism arises out of a combination of semantic and morphosyntactic facts of Ulwa grammar. Specifically, we propose that the Ulwa pattern exemplifies a possessive strategy of predication. Intuitively, this strategy is a manifestation in grammar of the idiomatic equivalence between the property of being F and the property of having F-ness. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantics of derived statives, deverbal adjectives that fail to entail there to have been a preceding (temporal) event of the kind named by the verb they are derived from, e.g. darkened in a darkened portion of skin. Building on Gawron’s (The lexical semantics of extent verbs, San Diego State University, ms, 2009) recent observations regarding the semantics of extent uses of change of state verbs (e.g., Kim’s skin darkens between the knee and the calf) and Kennedy (...) and Levin’s (Adjectives and adverbs: syntax, semantics and disclosure, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) theory of change, it is shown, contrary to previous analyses, that a fully compositional semantic analysis is possible, and thus that there is no argument from derived statives for word formation differing from semantic composition above the word level in requiring deletion operations, as in Dubinsky and Simango’s (Language 72:749–781, 1996) analysis. Further, such an analysis, by contrast with previous ones, both compositional (Jackson in Resultatives, derived statives, lexical semantic structure, Doctoral dissertation, UCLA, 2005b; Condoravdi and Deo in Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18), Seoul, 2008 and non-compositional (Dubinsky and Simango 1996), correctly predicts, as shown by a range of arguments, that the meaning of the derived stative contains the meaning of the verb it is derived from and that it therefore contrasts fundamentally with morphologically simple adjectives in the kind of meaning that it has. (shrink)

Persian possesses a number of stative complex predicates with _dâshtan_ ‘to have’ that express certain kinds of mental state. I propose that these _possessive experiencer complex predicates_ be given a formal semantic treatment involving possession of a portion of an abstract quality by an individual, as in the analysis of property concept lexemes due to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Language 91(3):533–563, 2015 ; Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34:93–106, 2016 ; Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property (...) concepts, Oxford University Press, 2017 ). Augmented with an analysis of prepositional phrases introducing the target of the mental state and an approach to gradability in terms of measure functions (Wellwood in Measuring predicates, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014 ), the analysis explains various properties of possessive experiencer complex predicates, including the behavior of target phrases, the ability of the non-verbal element to be modified by a range of adjectives, the direct participation of the non-verbal element in comparative constructions, and the ability of degree expressions to modify both the non-verbal element and the VP containing the complex predicate. Theoretically, the analysis ties transitive mental state expressions to the grammar and semantics of property concept sentences, which are expressed via possessive morphosyntax cross-linguistically, and connects with syntactic proposals that independently argue for a universal underlyingly possessive morphosyntax for mental state predicates (Noonan in Case and syntactic geometry, PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1992 ; Hale and Keyser in Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, MIT Press, 2002 ). The work here also motivates modifications to Francez and Koontz-Garboden’s original proposal, and opens new questions in the original empirical domain of the analysis of possessive predicating strategies for the expression of property concept sentences. (shrink)

This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant path/result verbs constitute (...) double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation. (shrink)