McNally, Louise, 1965-Spalek, Alexandra Anna2022-11-252022-11-252022McNally L, Spalek AA. Grammatically relevant aspects of meaning and verbal polysemy. Linguistics. 2022;60(6):1943–87. DOI: 10.1515/ling-2020-01671613-396Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/55000The 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.application/pdfeng© 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0167EnglishFigurative polysemyLexical semanticsSpanishVerbsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess