The Role of Adjuncts in the Construction of Verbal Meaning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/linguistica.62.1-2.27-51Keywords:
Adjuncts and Disambiguation, Verbal Polysemy, Lexical Agreement, Informational Relevance, Generative LexiconAbstract
This paper investigates how and why adjuncts play a role in the construction of verbal meaning, given that they are considered to be constituents which are not selected by the verb. The study focuses on a set of polysemous expressions in which the same meaning of the verb in combination with the same complement receives more than one interpretation.
The hypothesis defended here adopts the assumptions of the Generative Lexicon model (Pustejovsky 1995), namely that of the underspecification of lexical entries and their specification in different contexts by the operation of sub-lexical feature agreement mechanisms.
The proposed analysis considers verb adjuncts as predicates that select fragments from the underspecified definition of verbs and, in so doing, specify their meaning with two consequences: ambiguous predicates are no longer ambiguous and redundant predicates become informatively relevant.
The proposal accounts for a number of phenomena which syntax has failed to explain and which have not previously been related, and provides a more holistic picture of the construction of verb meaning, in which the involvement of adjuncts is central.
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