1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910810846703321

Autore

Dux Ryan

Titolo

Frame-constructional verb classes : change and theft verbs in English and German / / Ryan Dux

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Amsterdam ; ; Philadelphia : , : John Benjamins Publishing Company, , [2020]

©2020

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (332 pages)

Collana

Constructional Approaches to Language ; ; Volume 28

Disciplina

425

Soggetti

English language - Verb phrase

English language - Verb

German language - Verb phrase

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

1. Introduction -- 2. Approaches to verb classification -- 3. Frame semantics, construction grammar, and valency grammar -- 4. English change verbs -- 5. Comparing theft verbs to change verbs -- 6. A contrastive perspective: German change and theft verbs -- 7. Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

"While verb classes are a mainstay of linguistic research, the field lacks consensus on precisely what constitutes a verb class. This book presents a novel approach to verb classes, employing a bottom-up, corpus-based methodology and combining key insights Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, and Valency Grammar. On this approach, verb classes are formulated at varying granularity levels to adequately capture both the shared semantic and syntactic properties unifying verbs of a class and the idiosyncratic properties unique to individual verbs. In-depth analyses based on this approach shed light on the interrelations between verbs, frame-semantics, and constructions, and on the semantic richness and network organization of grammatical constructions. This approach is extended to a comparison of Change and Theft verbs, revealing unexpected lexical and syntactic differences across semantically distinct classes. Finally, a range of contrastive (German-English) analyses demonstrate how verb



classes can inform the cross-linguistic comparison of verbs and constructions"--