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Based on both syntactic and semantic criteria, Stewart (2001) and, following him, Baker and Stewart (1999), distinguish two types of serial verb constructions (SVC) and one type of covert coordination (CC) in Edo. In this article, we present an analysis of these constructions, using Type Logical Grammar (TLG) with an event-based semantic component. We choose as base logic the non-associative Lambek calculus augmented with two unary multiplicative connectives (NL(◊, □)). SVCs and CCs are interpreted as complex event structures. The complex predicates underlying these structures are derived from simple verbs by means of a constructor. SVCs and CCs differ in terms of which part of the complex event structure is denoted. For SVCs, this is the sum of all events in the structure whereas for a CC this is only the first event in the sequence. The two verbs in an SVC and a CC are treated asymmetrically by assuming that the first verb has an extended subcategorization frame. The additional argument is of type vp (possibly modally decorated). Constraints on word order and the realization of arguments are accounted for using structural rules like permutation and contraction. The application of these rules is enforced by making use of the unary connectives.

Fictive motion, i.e., the figurative stative use of verbs of motion, has attracted much attention in cognitive linguistics as a paradigm case for how basic dynamic concepts are exploited figuratively in concept formation (Langacker 1986; Matsumoto 1996; Talmy 2000; Matlock 2004a, b inter alia). In this paper, we present a case study of the fictive motion reading of the German movement verb steigen ‘climb, rise’ and explore how it can be related to the various dynamic readings of the verb. In our account of steigen, which builds on Gamerschlag, Geuder & Petersen’s (2014) analysis of the dynamic readings of the verb, we contrast the different readings in terms of frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures in the sense of Barsalou (1992) and Petersen (2007/2015).

The role of scalarity has attracted increasing attention in recent analyses of verb-related phenomena such as aspectuality (telicity and durativity) and argument realization. A central issue in this regard is which types of verbs express a scalar change and which do not. There is some agreement that incremental theme verbs do not come with a scale but instead depend on an incremental theme argument which introduces the scale. By contrast, it is assumed that change of state verbs already lexicalize a scale as part of their meaning and may therefore be considered as scalar verbs. In this paper, we tackle the question whether all change of state verbs are scalar in the sense that they fully lexicalize a scale. We argue that a change of state verb can be scalar, even if not all of the scale parameters are lexically specified, and propose a typology of scalar underspecification. We discuss two types of strategies that are applied for the resolution of scalar underspecification: (i) introduction of a missing parameter by the context and (ii) composition with a scale-denoting argument. We focus on the compositional aspects of scale structure and illustrate the interaction between verbs and arguments in building scalar changes.

Hit-verbs have three basic meaning components, namely movement, contact and force (e.g. [12], Levin 1993), which interact with the verbs’ argument structure in various ways. In this paper, we map out the different grammatical constructions of the German verb schlagen (usually, though loosely, translated as ‘hit’; also ‘beat’, ‘strike’) and their restrictions on agentivity and the force component. Using modification by pure manner adverbs as a tool to test for possible default values of the force component, and agent-oriented adverbs to discover possible interactions with agentivity, we show that German schlagen is rather liberal with respect to its force component. Crucially, the force component may not only be modified by standard, force-denoting manner adverbs such as lightly and hard, but also through agent-oriented adverbs such as playfully, via a defeasible inference. We show further that our findings can be profitably modelled in Frame Semantics, a framework which is especially well suited for modelling a fine-grained decomposition of word meaning, including the manner-related components of verbs.

In this article we investigate the argument structure of Japanese V-V compounds from the perspective of Dynamic Event Semantics (Naumann 2001). The argument structure of a verb is defined as a linearly ordered set of so-called dynamic roles. Dynamic roles differ from thematic relations in characterizing participants in terms of sets of results that are brought about in the course of an event. The patterns of argument sharing found in Japanese V-V compounds are shown to derive from compatibility constraints on the different results that are assigned to a shared argument. In addition, it is argued that the phenomenon of argument blocking follows from the Subject-Head Constraint (Gamerschlag 2000, 2002). This constraint requires the highest argument (= subject) of the head verb to be the highest argument of the compound.