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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.

This open access book presents novel theoretical, empirical and experimental work exploring the nature of mental representations that support natural language production and understanding, and other manifestations of cognition. One fundamental question raised in the text is whether requisite knowledge structures can be adequately modeled by means of a uniform representational format, and if so, what exactly is its nature. Frames are a key topic covered which have had a strong impact on the exploration of knowledge representations in artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics; cascades are a novel development in frame theory. Other key subject areas explored are: concepts and categorization, the experimental investigation of mental representation, as well as cognitive analysis in semantics. This book is of interest to students, researchers, and professionals working on cognition in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.

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).

In order to help to explain cognition, cognitive structures are assumed to be present in the mind/brain. While the empirical investigation of such structures is the task of cognitive psychology, the other cognitive science disciplines like linguistics, philosophy and artificial intelligence have an important role in suggesting hypotheses. Researchers in these disciplines increasingly test such hypotheses by empirical means themselves. In philosophy, the traditional way of referring to such structures is via concepts, i.e. those mental entities by which we conceive reality and with the help of which we reason and plan. Linguists traditionally refer to the cognitive structures as meanings—at least those linguists with a mentalistic concept of meaning do who do not think of meaning as extra-mental entities.

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.

Stative verbs such as Germanwiegen‘weigh’ andheißen‘be called’ encode an attribute of the subject referent such as WEIGHT or NAME and, in addition, allow for the specification of a value for this attribute. From a cognitive perspective, we refer to attributes of this type asobject dimensionsand to stative verbs encoding object dimensions asstative dimensional verbs. We argue in favor of the relevance of these verbs to cognitive science and semantics. After introducing basic types of stative dimensional verbs, we discuss the results of an in-depth investigation of these verbs in German. In addition to the kind of dimensions encoded by stative verbs, there will be a particular focus on contrasts in the distribution of dimension encoding verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Moreover, we will present a taxonomy of stative dimensional verbs in dependence of the specific dimension.

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.

So-called phenomenon-based perception verbs such as ‘sound, taste (of)’, and ‘look (like)’ allow for a use in inferential evidential constructions of the type ‘The chocolate egg tastes old’. In this paper, we propose a frame-theoretic analysis of this use in which we pursue the question how well-formed inferential uses can be discriminated from awkward uses such as #‘The chocolate egg tastes oval’. We argue that object knowledge plays a central role in this respect and that this knowledge is ideally captured in frame representations in which object properties are easily translated into attributes such as TASTE, smell, age, and form. We represent the more general knowledge of the range and domain of the attributes in a type signature. In principle, an inference is recognized as admissible if the values of one attribute can be inferred from the values of another attribute. In the analysis, this kind of inferability is modeled as an inference structure defined on the type signature. The definitions of type signatures and inference structures enable us to establish two constraints which are sufficient to discriminate the admissible and inadmissible uses of phenomenon-based perception verbs in simple subject-verb-adjective constructions.

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