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How Complex Verbs Acquire Their Idiosyncratic Meanings.

Sergei Monakhov¹

¹Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany.

Language and Speech

|September 29, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

This study proposes a new model for understanding complex verbs, differentiating between those with fixed bases and those with fixed prefixes. This approach explains how both compositional and non-compositional meanings arise in verbs, using Russian data as evidence.

Keywords:

Complex verbs compositionality parsability particle verbs prefix verbs productivity semantic idiosyncrasy semantic transparency

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Area of Science:

Linguistics
Semantics
Computational Linguistics

Background:

Complex verbs can exhibit both compositional and non-compositional meanings, posing challenges for semantic analysis.
Existing research has extensively studied non-compositional senses but has not fully clarified their semantic origins.
The contribution of preverbs/prefixes/particles to non-compositional meanings remains counterintuitive and difficult to isolate.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose a novel framework for analyzing compositional and non-compositional complex verbs.
To model complex verbs as two distinct construction types: one with a fixed base and open prefix slot, and another with a fixed prefix and open base slot.
To explain the semantic idiosyncrasies and meaning processing of complex verbs.

Main Methods:

Analysis of Russian complex verbs, utilizing both experimental and corpus-based evidence.
Development of two distinct meaning-processing models corresponding to the proposed construction types.
Statistical analysis of transition probabilities between preverbs/prefixes/particles and base verbs.

Main Results:

Complex verbs can be effectively analyzed as instantiations of two construction types: fixed base/open prefix or fixed prefix/open base.
Experimental and corpus data support the proposed constructional analysis for Russian complex verbs.
The choice between construction types can be predicted by analyzing the discrepancy in transition probabilities between components.

Conclusions:

The proposed constructional approach provides a unified framework for understanding both compositional and non-compositional complex verbs.
This model offers a clearer explanation for the origin of semantic idiosyncrasies in complex verbs.
The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of verb semantics and meaning composition in linguistics.