The Roots of Verbal Meaning

This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It presents a new theory of possible root meanings and their interaction with event templates that produces a new typology of possible verbs, with semantic and grammatical properties determined not just by templates, but also by roots.

John Beavers is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin. His current research interests are largely in the area of lexical semantics, where he has explored the ways in which word meanings are decomposed into more basic components, how these components are interpreted truth conditionally, and the principles by which a word's meaning correlates with and ultimately determines its grammatical behaviour. This work has included detailed studies of relevant phenomena in a range of languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Colloquial Sinhala, Kinyarwanda, and Romanian, plus cross-linguistic and typological studies. His research has been published in journals such as Lingua, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and Linguistic Inquiry. Andrew Koontz-Garboden is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at The University of Manchester, where he has worked since 2007. He is interested in in the morphosyntax/semantics interface and the implications of cross-linguistic variation for the nature of that interface. His work has drawn on data from a range of languages, including Basaa (Bantu; Cameroon), Huave (isolate, Mexico), Spanish, Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua), and English. He is the co-author, with Itamar Francez, of Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation: Qualities and the Grammar of Property Concepts (OUP 2017), and author of multiple articles in journals such as Lingua, Natural Language Semantics, and Theoretical Linguistics.