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• Elements of a communication frame - Construction grammar - The linguistic expression of communication - Frequencies and complementation patterns of cwethan, say, speak, talk, and tell in Old and Middle English - Communication construction and direct-speech construction - Structure and functions of medial reporting clauses in Middle English.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

English verbs of speaking have been affected by profound and intriguing changes, in particular between Old and Middle English. These changes crucially involve the loss of the verb cwethan and its replacement by say, which remains the most common verb of speaking to this day. The present study provides an exhaustive corpus-based, cross-period, and multi-dimensional appraisal of verbs of speaking used as part of the linguistic expression of communication in the history of English situated within a frame-semantic and constructionist framework. Moreover, it elucidates the fascinating changes affecting the verbs used to talk about communication between Old and Middle English. Also, this study sheds light on the functions of medially placed reporting clauses emerging in the Middle English period.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments Abbreviations Glossing conventions
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Entailments of change in the roots of change-of-state verbs
• 3: The roots of ditransitive verbs of caused possession
• 4: Manner/Result Complementarity and causation in verbal roots
• 5: Conclusion References Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. John Beavers and Andrew Koontz-Garboden adopt the now common view that verb meanings consist at least partly of an event structure, made up of two elements: an event template describing the verb's broad temporal and causal contours, which occurs across lots of verbs and groups them into semantic and grammatical classes; and an idiosyncratic root describing specific, real world states and actions that distinguish between verbs with the same template. While much work has focused on templates, less work has addressed the truth-conditional contributions of roots, despite the importance of a theory of root meaning in fully defining the predictions made by event structural approaches. This book aims to address this gap by exploring two previously proposed constraints on root meaning: The Bifurcation Thesis of Roots, whereby roots never introduce the meanings introduced by templates, and Manner/Result Complementarity, which specifies that roots can describe either a manner or a result state but never both at the same time. Two extended case studies, on change-of-state verbs and ditransitive verbs of caused possession, show that neither hypothesis holds, and that ultimately there may be no constraints on what a root can mean. Nonetheless, the book argues that event structures still have predictive value: it presents a new theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, in which systematic semantic and grammatical properties are determined not just by templates, but also by roots.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

It's the most simple, unassuming, innocent-looking verb: 'to be'. Yet it is jam-packed with more different meanings, forms, and uses than any other English word. As he reveals be's multiple incarnations, David Crystal takes us to the heart of our flexible and changing language. He tells the intriguing story in 26 chapters, each linked to a particular usage. We meet circumstantial be ('how are you?'), numerical be ('two and two is four'), quotative be ('so I was like, "wow"'), and ludic be ('oh no he isn't!'), and a whole swarm of other meanings. Bringing the ideas to life are a host of examples from sources as varied as Beowulf, Jane Austen, pantomime, Hamlet (of course), and Star Wars, with cartoons from Ed McLachlan and Punch peppered throughout. Full of fascinating nuggets of information, it is a book to delight any lover of words and language.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The first study of the English verb in the context of Gustave Guillaume's theory of psychomechanics.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Modal auxiliaries in political interviews : a semantic analysis / Heidi Verplaetse
• Extraposition of gerundial and infinitival subjects : factors and figures / Katrien Deroey.

• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: theoretical and descriptive approaches to the study of the verb in English Bas Aarts and Charles F. Meyer
• Part I. Theoretical Approaches to the Study of the English Verb: 2. Grammatical relations in English Charles F. Meyer
• 3. Competence without comp? Richard Hudson
• 4. On the semantics of the object I. M. Schlesinger
• 5. Secondary predicates in English Bas Aarts
• 6. The English perfect as a secondary past tense Rodney Huddleston
• 7.'How does this sentence interpret?' The semantics of English mediopassives Andrew Rosta
• 8. The expression of root and epistemic possibility in English Jennifer Coates
• Part II. Descriptive Approaches to the Study of the English Verb: 9. Find and want: a corpus-based case study in verb complementation Jan Aarts and Flor Aarts
• 10. Indeterminacy between noun phrases and adjective phrases as complements of the English verb Geoffrey Leech and Lu Li
• 11. Having a look at the expanded predicate John Algeo
• 12. 'This scheme is badly needed': some aspects of verb-adverb collocations Stig Johanssen
• 13. That and zero complementisers in late modern English: exploring ARCHER from 1650-1990 Edward Finegan and Douglas Biber
• 14. Changing patterns of complementation, and concomitant grammaticalisation, of the verb help in present-day British English Christian Mair
• 15. Verbs in public and private speaking Jan Svartvik and Olof Ekedahl
• 16. Some remarks on comment clauses Anna-Brita Stenstrom
• Index of names
• Subject index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field sheds new light on the verb in English. The central concern of the volume is to illustrate that verbs can only be adequately and properly understood if studied from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective. In part one, theoretical topics are explored: terminological problems of classifying verbs and verb-related elements, the 'determining' properties of verbs, verb complementation, the semantics and pragmatics of verbs and verbal combinations, and the notions of tense, aspect, voice and modality. In part two, computer corpora are used to study various types of verb complements and collocations, to trace the development in English of certain verb forms and to detail the usage of verbs in different varieties and genres of English.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning. The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments. The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part. Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references. The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory. Easy to use, English Verb Classes and Alternations sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A long established and highly regarded account of all aspects of the English verb taking account of recent work on tense, phase and aspect, and of the author's own research. Theoretical discussion is kept to a minimum, but the arguments are always presented within a modern theoretical framework.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• T.1. Tempus und Aspekt
• t. 2. Die Mondalverben, eine kontrastive analyse der Mondalverben im Englischen und Deutschen