Grammatically relevant aspects of meaning and verbal polysemy

McNally, Louise, 1965-; Spalek, Alexandra Anna

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0167

Grammatically relevant aspects of meaning and verbal polysemy

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McNally L, Spalek AA. Grammatically relevant aspects of meaning and verbal polysemy. Linguistics. 2022;60(6):1943–87. DOI: 10.1515/ling-2020-0167

Abstract

The debate over the relation between grammatically relevant (specifically, what we term event referential) and idiosyncratic aspects of verb meaning has produced a considerable literature. Some authors, such as Levin and Rappaport Hovav, have appealed to figurative uses of verbs as a source of data when the analysis of their literal uses has been controversial, a move that has sometimes been criticized. However, the question of whether figurative uses of verbs preserve the event referential properties of their literal counterparts and are therefore a valid source of data has not, to our knowledge, been systematically explored. We offer two detailed cross-linguistic case studies of Spanish and English verbs to provide an argument that figurative verb uses indeed are a reliable source of evidence for identifying event referential components of meaning: In each case study we find clear evidence for the preservation of these components across uses, indicating that these aspects of meaning both constrain and facilitate figurative uses of verbs.