The anatomy of a verb: "tear", "rasgar", and lexical equivalence
Alexandra Spalek, Louise McNally
March 2025 

Figurative polysemy, in which a word’s original meaning is extended into domains for which it did not originally apply, is a pervasive property of human language. Previous research using cross-linguistic (English/Spanish) data has shown that an important set of similarities and differences in patterns of figurative verb polysemy between counterpart verbs in two languages can be explained by detailed analysis of the event structures of each verb (McNally and Spalek, 2022). Here we treat a complementary case involving counterpart verbs in two languages which share the same basic event structures but differ in details of conceptual (or ‘root’) content, most importantly in the semantic restrictions on their participants. We show how, in this sort of case, the verbs will describe the same types of situations and be amenable to similar figurative extensions as long as their respective semantic restrictions can be met, but not otherwise. Teasing apart contrasts due to variation in event structural vs. conceptual content can shed light both on debates about the relation between root and grammatical content, as well as on the challenges of establishing lexical equivalences for verbs, be it for purposes of translation or for cross-linguistic comparison and the creation of lexical resources.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008873 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	to appear in Languages in Contrast
keywords:	verbs, roots, lexical semantics, event structure, syntax/semantics interface, semantics, syntax
Downloaded:	201 times

 

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