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States and Changes of State: A Crosslinguistic Study of the Roots of Verbal Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

John Beavers ,
Michael Everdell ,
Kyle Jerro ,
Henri Kauhanen ,
Andrew Koontz-Garboden ,
Elise Le Bovidge  and
Stephen Nichols
John Beavers*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
Michael Everdell*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
Kyle Jerro*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Henri Kauhanen*
Affiliation:
University of Konstanz
Andrew Koontz-Garboden*
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester
Elise Le Bovidge*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Stephen Nichols*
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester
*
Beavers and Everdell, Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin, 305 E. 23rd Street, Mail Code B5100, Austin, TX 78712, [jtbeavers@utexas.edu], [everdellm@utexas.edu]
Beavers and Everdell, Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin, 305 E. 23rd Street, Mail Code B5100, Austin, TX 78712, [jtbeavers@utexas.edu], [everdellm@utexas.edu]
Jerro, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park C04 3SQ, Colchester, UK, [k.jerro@essex.ac.uk]
Kauhanen, Department of Linguistics & Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstraße 10, 78464 Konstanz, Germany, [henri.kauhanen@uni-konstanz.de]
Koontz-Garboden and Nichols, Department of Linguistics and English Language, The University of Manchester, Samuel Alexander Building, Oxford Road M13 9PL, Manchester, UK, [andrewkg@manchester.ac.uk], [stephen.nichols@manchester.ac.uk]
LeBovidge, Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, 1417 NE 42nd Street, Seattle, WA 98105, [eliseal@uw.edu]
Koontz-Garboden and Nichols, Department of Linguistics and English Language, The University of Manchester, Samuel Alexander Building, Oxford Road M13 9PL, Manchester, UK, [andrewkg@manchester.ac.uk], [stephen.nichols@manchester.ac.uk]
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Abstract

What are the basic building blocks of verb meanings, how are they composed into more complex meanings, and how does this explain the grammatical properties of verbs and their relationships to other words with related meanings? These questions are fundamental to the study of verb meaning, and some of the most fruitful attempts to answer them have come from event-structural theories, wherein verb meanings are assumed to be decomposed into an event template, which captures the verb's broad temporal and causal contours, and an idiosyncratic root shared across templates, which describes specific actions and states for a given verb. An open question is what the division of labor is between the template and the root in a given verb's event template, and whether their meanings are bifurcated: are broad eventive lexical entailments introduced only by the templates, never the idiosyncratic roots? Since event templates and not roots are the primary semantic correlates of a verb's grammatical properties, bifurcation would make strong predictions about the correlation of a verb's broad temporal and causal semantics and its syntax and morphology. We argue against this bifurcation by comparing translation equivalents of Levin's (1993) non-deadjectival vs. deadjectival change-of-state verb roots in English (e.g. result vs. property concept roots) across languages. A broad-scale typological study reveals that property concept roots tend to have unmarked stative forms and marked verbal forms, while result roots have the opposite pattern. Semantic studies of several languages confirm that terms built on result roots always entail change, while terms based on property concept roots do not. This supports a theory wherein result roots entail change independent of the template, contra bifurcation. This supports a more complex, albeit still principled, theory of possible event-structural meaning and its grammatical correlates, one that takes subclasses of roots into account, while showing the value of this type of crosslinguistic methodology for testing the predictions of event-structural approaches.

Keywords

lexical semanticseventsevent structurechange of staterootstypology

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 97 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 439 - 484
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. BCS-1451765. Publication fees and portions of the research were funded by European Research Council Consolidator Grant ERC-2017-COG 769192. Henri Kauhanen was funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation, and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments. All morphological data collected for this study are available online at https://verbal-roots.la.utexas.edu/, and computer code to replicate all of our analyses can be downloaded from https://github.com/hkauhanen/verbal-roots or https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5069407. We are especially grateful to Line Mikkelsen, Gillian Ramchand, and two anonymous referees for their detailed comments on an earlier draft, as well as to Ashwini Deo and Itamar Francez for both discussion and judgments on Marathi and Hebrew, respectively, Serge Sagna for data and discussion on Gújjolaay Eegimaa, Daniel Valle for discussion and help collecting Kakataibo data, Cristian Juarez for help collecting data on Mocoví, Jaime Pérez Gonzalez for data from Tzeltal and help with Spanish, Sandie Keerstock for help with French, Connie Loos and Kirsten Meeman for help with German, and Scott Spicer and Maayan Haim for help with Hebrew. We also thank Luke Adamson, Daniel Altshuler, Elena Anagnostopoulou, Fernanda Barrientos, Nora Boneh, Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Alex Brown, Beaudry Chase, Heidi Harley, Matthew E. Husband, Nikki Grant, Larry Horn, Itamar Kastner, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Beth Levin, Jacques Lefleur, Fabienne Martin, Louise McNally, Victor Mena, Laura Michaelis, Seungho Nam, Johanna Nichols, Peter Petré, Tillmann Poss, James Pustejovsky, Malka Rappaport Hovav, Helen Salgi, Giorgos Spathas, Lindia Tjuatja, Elly van Gelderen, Julia Zinova, Joost Zwarts, and audiences at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting 2017, Beyond Time 2017, Endpoints 2018, The University of Edinburgh, Seoul National University, and The University of Texas Department of Linguistics syntax/semantics research group for their feedback. Finally, we are eminently grateful to Stacy Vlasits for his technical expertise.

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