Grammatically Relevant Aspects of Meaning and Verbal Polysemy

Send an email mhahn2 [at] stanford.edu (subject: Zoom%20link%20for%20the%20McNally%2FSpalek%20talk, body: Please%20send%20me%20the%20Zoom%20link%20for%20the%20McNally%2FSpalek%20talk) (here to receive the Zoom link)

In the debate over the viability of Manner/Result Complementarity as a principle constraining verb meaning (MRC, Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1991; see, e.g., Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2017 for recent discussion), figurative uses of verb have occasionally been used as a source of data (see, e.g., Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2013, Rappaport Hovav 2017 and references cited in these works). The assumptions underlying the appeal to figurative uses have ostensibly been that 1) it is possible to distinguish grammatically relevant from "idiosyncratic" aspects of meaning, and 2) the former are consistent across the literal and figurative uses of a verb, given a particular syntactic frame, and thus can sometimes illuminate what is essential to a verb's meaning vs. contextually inferred.  However, the question of whether figurative uses of verbs preserve grammatically relevant semantic properties of their literal counterparts (assuming these exist) and are therefore a valid source of evidence has not, to our knowledge, been systematically explored. In this talk we present a snapshot of the results from a comparative study of various Spanish and English verbs, which indicate that figurative verb uses are, with some caveats, indeed informative in debates such as that over MRC (we do not, however, discuss the MRC debate itself). More specifically, we argue that independently proposed contrasts in the syntax/semantics interface of literal uses of counterpart verbs in the two languages -- which we consider to constitute reasonable examples of grammatically relevant aspects of meaning --, together with the approach to figurative meaning in Bowdle & Gentner 2005, shed light on contrasts in their figurative uses that are not otherwise readily explained.