This dissertation is an investigation of serial verb constructions in Lao (Tai-Kadai, SVO) and the events that they encode. Serial verb constructions (SVCs), structures where multiple verbs appear in a single clause, raise several important questions for syntactic theory. One issue is how the verbs are related; proposals involving coordination (Payne 1985), subordination (Collins 1997), and adjunction (Hale 1991; Muansuwan 2002) have all been made, while others have made a case for unorthodox double-headed structures (Baker & Stewart 2002; Baker 1989). Additionally, the argument sharing seen in SVCs is seemingly incompatible with proposed constraints on theta-role assignment, such as the Theta-Criterion (Chomsky 1981) or the Biuniqueness Condition (Bresnan 1980). In this thesis I describe new data from the Lao language focusing on two subtypes of SVC that Stewart (1998) calls consequential SVCs (CSVCs) and resultative SVCs (RSVCs). I propose a generative analysis of these structures where an event head licenses a complex VP containing multiple verbs where the object is thematically related to the complex VP rather than the individual predicates. Evidence for the event head comes from a modified version of the explicit segmentation task (Zacks et al. 2001). During the experiment, participants were instructed to divide video clips into events. When participants saw a CSVC before the video, they divided the action sequence depicted by the CSVC into fewer events than when participants saw a coordinated construction before the video. These results suggest that seeing the SVC prompted the participants to group the target sequence of events in the videos together as a larger macro-event, supporting the claim that SVCs encode a single event (contra Foley 2010). These data also support the proposal that events are conceptualized at the clausal level, rather than at the verbal level, which is in line with proposals from Evans (2010), Jackendoff (1991), and Pustejovsky (1991).

Analyses of English verb meaning often rely on quasi-aspectual operators embedded in event structures to explain shared properties across classes. These operators scope over temporally basic meaning elements that make up the idiosyncratic semantic core of complex verbs. While the inventory of operators – or semantic primes – differ from proposal to proposal, they are generally presented as a closed class that includes at least CAUSE and BECOME, and their presence and location in event structures account for several alternation and ambiguity phenomena. In this study, I investigate a number verbs whose decompositions would include only operator(s) and event structure frames under most current decompositional lexical theories; in particular, the periphrastic causatives (cause, make, etc) and the verbs of becoming (become, get, etc). I account for differences in the selectional behavior of these verbs by positing incorporated meaning components beyond the purely aspectual or event structural. Based in part on regularities among corpus collocations, I propose additional meaning distinctions among these verbs along the parameters of causal patient complicity, sentiment, and register. / text

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In the diachronic studies of Afrikaans in the past, the focus used to be on the origin and early development of Afrikaans from Dutch. During the twentieth century, the philological school, with a tradition of researching all Cape-Dutch coloured texts in detail, was established through the work of J. du P. Scholtz and his students. Through their analyses, they estimated the stabilisation of Afrikaans as early as the end of the eighteenth century (for example Raidt, 1991:145; Ponelis, 1994:229). In the past few decades, however, this estimation has begun to receive criticism from other scholars, including Roberge (1994:159) and Deumert (2004:20). With the help of a corpus, Deumert (2004) has shown that there is substantial variation in Afrikaans letters as late as the early twentieth century, and this study expands on her work by researching the variation in published writing. This is done by focusing on verbs, as there is significant change from the Dutch verbal system to the Afrikaans verbal system. This study uses corpus linguistic research methods, and researches Dutch-Afrikaans variation in verbs in published Afrikaans texts, compiled in three corpora. The main corpus was compiled from all the Afrikaans writings of Totius (J.D. du Toit) in the publication Het Kerkblad from 1916 to 1922. Two control corpora are also used: the first was compiled from excerpts from published Afrikaans books for the same period, and the second was compiled from excerpts from Afrikaans periodicals for the same period. In order to compensate for the shortcomings of corpus data alone, normative works on Afrikaans from the relevant period are also taken into account, and there is shown which recommendations these works made about the relevant constructions, and how the corpus data correlates with these recommendations. Variation in six verbal constructions are analysed in this study: 1. End consonant t/n (for example gaat/gaan): the old (more Dutch) word forms are scarcely used in the corpora, while the modern Afrikaans word forms are almost fully established. 2. End consonant g (for example seg/sê): the old word forms are also scarcely used in the corpora, while the modern word forms take the lead. 3. Stem vowel (for example breng/bring): the old word forms are more frequent at the beginning of the period, followed by some uncertainty, with the modern word forms taking over by the end of the period. 4. Preterite (specifically had/gehad and werd/geword): there is great instability throughout, worsened by a distinction in use between main verbs and auxiliary verbs made by some authors. 5. Past participle (for example gedaan/gedoen): there is significant instability at the beginning of the period, but the modern word forms are used more frequently by the end of the period. 6. Perfect tense auxiliary verb (is/het): the old form is still used in the corpora, but the modern form is more frequent from the beginning, and becomes even more frequent towards the end. This data shows that there was still significant variation in Afrikaans under Dutch influence as late as the early twentieth century, and the correlation between the different corpora implies that the written language might have been much closer to the spoken language than had been previously assumed. It is further confirmed by the amount of attention this variation gets in the normative works from that period. / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2013

Graduate / 0290

Graduate / 0290

This thesis explores certain aspects of the structure of lexical semantics and its interaction with pragmatic processes of utterance comprehension, using as a case-study a sample of the English modal verbs. Contrary to previous polysemy-based accounts, I propose and defend a unitary semantic account of the English modals, and I give a relevance-theoretic explanation of the construction of their admissible (mainly, root and epistemic) contextual interpretations. Departing from previous accounts of modality, I propose a link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation, and treat the emergence of epistemic modal markers as a result of the development of the human theory of mind. In support of my central contention that the English modals are semantically univocal, I reanalyse a range of arguments employed by previous polysemy-based approaches. These arguments involve the distributional properties of the modals, their relationship to truth-conditional content, the status of so-called speech-act modality, and the historical development of epistemic meanings: it turns out that none of these domains can offer reasons to abandon the univocal semantic analysis of the English modals. Furthermore, I argue that the priority of root over epistemic meanings in language acquisition is predicted by the link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation. Finally, data from a cognitive disorder (autism) are considered in the light of the metarepresentation hypothesis about epistemic modality. The discussion of modality has a number of implications for the concept of polysemy. I suggest that, despite its widespread use in current lexical semantics, polysemy is not a natural class, and use the example of the Cognitive Linguistics to illustrate that polysemy presupposes some questionable assumptions about the structure of lexical concepts. I propose a division of labour between ambiguity, semantic underdeterminacy, and a narrowed version of polysemy, and present its ramifications for the psychology of word meaning. In the final chapter, I extend the proposed framework for modality to the analysis of generic sentences, thereby capturing certain similarities between genericity and modality.

Orientador: Bento Carlos Dias da Silva / Banca: Maria Helena de Moura Neves / Banca: Rove Luiza de Oliveira Chishman / Resumo: A partir da hipótese de que a estrutura de argumentos projetada pelo verbo reflete aspectos da sua estrutura conceitual, esta dissertação investiga um conjunto de teorias que analisam essa interface sintaxe-semântica com o objetivo de recortar uma representação das dimensões sintática e semântica para essa classe lexical. Do ponto de vista lingüístico, analisam-se as propriedades léxico-semânticas de um conjunto de verbos do português do Brasil, extraído da base de verbos da rede WordNet.Br e nocionalmente correspondente à classe semântica dos verbos do inglês "Verbos de Destitução de Posse-Verbos do Tipo 'Roubar'", isolada por Levin (1993). As representações léxico-semântica e léxico-sintática fundamentam-se, respectivamente, na teoria sobre as Estruturas Conceituais de Jackendoff (1990, 2002) e na teoria sobre a Estrutura de Argumentos de Hale e Keyser (2002). Do ponto de vista lingüístico-computacional, desenvolvem-se uma estratégia de construção e refinamento dos synsets de verbos da rede WordNet.Br e uma proposta de representação formal das dimensões sintáticas e conceitual para os verbos. / Abstract: This thesis presents an inquiry on the lexical-syntactic and the lexical-semantic representation of verbs from the perspective that aspects of verb's argument structure reflect its conceptual structure. In the linguistic domain, the thesis investigates both the lexical-semantic and lexical-syntactic properties of the synset of Brazilian Portuguese verbs extracted from the WordNet.Br lexical database that corresponds to Levin's (1993) class of verbs of Possessional Deprivation-Steal/Rob Verbs. The lexical-semantic and lexical-syntactic representation are grounded in Jackendoff's (1990, 2002) Semantic Structures Theory and Hale and Keyser's (2002) Argument Structure Theory, respectively. In the computational-linguistic domain, it presents both a strategy for constructing and refining the WordNet.Br verb synsets and a formal representation for describing the syntactic and conceptual dimensions of verbs. / Mestre

This thesis provides a detailed study of the semantics, grammar, and pragmatics of positional verbs from a typological perspective in Gurenɛ, a Gur (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Northern Ghana. The study documents and describes Gurenɛ positional verbs in detail focusing on a set of over thirty contrastive positional verbs using a documentary corpus of natural and stimuli-based elicited data. “Positional verbs” is used in this study as a cover term that refers to a class of verbs that semantically encode the static assumed body posture or position of animate entities (humans and animals) or the static location of inanimates (objects) in space. The study discusses the Gurenɛ data in the context of recent cross-linguistic studies on posture, positional and locative verbs (Newman 2002a; Levinson & Wilkins 2006a, Ameka & Levinson 2007a) which suggest that some languages employ verbs rather than adpositions to describe locations. It compares the Gurenɛ data to these typological studies to establish the similarities and the differences of the semantics of these verbs. Like other languages observed in these studies, the use of verbs in the Gurenɛ locative construction is obligatory and the verbs constitute the main linguistic means that the speakers use for locative descriptions. The thesis further explores in part, the basic locative construction (BLC) typology of Levinson & Wilkins (2006a) and Ameka & Levinson (2007a). The BLC typology is concerned with the use of verbs in languages to express spatial locative information with the claim that languages can be classified into four main types according to the number and types of verbs used in their BLC; Type 0 (no verb), Type I (one locative verb or a copula), Type II (three to seven postural verbs), and Type III (seven to +100 positional verbs). In Gurenɛ over thirty verbs are identified that can be used in its BLC. As a result, Gurenɛ is classified as a Type III language. Like any other Type III language, as predicted by the BLC typology, the language uses its verbs to describe a wide range of precise semantic notions involving different locative relations between the Figure and the Ground such as body position, elevation, attachment, containment, distribution, and relative distance. The findings among others suggest that in a locative scene where the Ground is elevated more specific verbs of elevation with very precise meanings associated with the Figure’s properties which include stable base support, shape, and position are used. Additionally, the Ground elevation disregards the actual posture of the Figure. Thus, if a speaker observes a Figure on the ground (earth or floor level) the actual posture verb is used, but if the Figure is on an elevated Ground (e.g., a tabletop, a rooftop) the actual posture is disregarded. This “elevation” phenomenon has not been fully discussed in the cross-linguistic studies of the positional and locative verbs in the semantic literature. The Gurenɛ data make a contribution toward clarification of the range and type of distinctions to be accounted for in the semantic typology of the use of these verbs in locative descriptions.

abstract: This dissertation provides an account of evidentiality of a number of selected verbs of perception in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The verbs are divided into three categories: activity, experiential, and source-based, following Viberg (1983). The data shows that the activity P.Vs in MSA are rarely used evidentially whereas the experiential and the source-based ones are commonly used to indicate evidential meaning. It also shows that while the source-based verb is mostly used with an inferred evidential meaning, the evidentiality encoded by the experiential perception verbs is determined by the complementation pattern and the person of the subject (first or third person subject). With the non-finite complement, these verbs indicate a direct evidentiality when having a first person subject, and a reported evidentiality when having a third person subject. With the finite CP complement, they indicate an indirect evidentiality. This corpus-based study also examines the grammaticalization of these verbs when used evidentially. I argue that only the verb ra’aa of the selected experiential verbs is fully grammaticalized, but only when it is in the past tense and followed by a verbal non-finite complement. In this usage, it becomes a light verb. The source-based verb badaa/yabduu when indicating an evidentiality, it is grammaticalized into copulative verb when followed by an adjectival predicate, and modal verb when followed by a finite complement. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019