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In this paper, we present a case study of German light verb constructions (LVCs) with the posture verbstehen‘stand’ which builds on the insights of different works dealing with non-light uses of posture verbs. Starting from the literal uses of posture verbs, we will show how the meaning components of these uses are systematically exploited in the different interpretational patterns ofstehenLVCs. In particular, we will discuss the effect of the choice of the preposition and how it interacts with the meaning of the light verb and the noun. Since the variant of frame semantics (e.g., Barsalou 1992; Petersen 2007, 2015) adopted in our analysis allows for a uniform representation of nouns, verbs and prepositions, we can make explicit reference to all the relevant meaning components of light verb constructions in a single format.

Most decompositional approaches are confined to representing event structural properties whereas the idiosyncratic lexical content is often reduced to an unanalyzed atomic root. While approaches of this type are successfully applied to argument linking and some additional grammatical phenomena, we argue that other grammatically relevant aspects of verb behavior cannot be accounted for in this way. In order to illustrate the limits of ‘traditional’ decompositional accounts, we focus on the class of verbs of emission. Verbs of this class exhibit some grammatical asymmetries whose analysis requires lexical decomposition beyond traditional event structure templates. We argue that frames are a suitable format for extending event structure templates and provide an analysis of the phenomena at issue.

In this paper we discuss the class of stative dimensional verbs. Stative verbs of this type such as German