Transitivity Alternations Event Types And Light Verbs

Transitivity Alternations, Event-types and Light Verbs

Complex Predicates

Complex predicates are multipredicational, but monoclausal structures. They have proven problematic for linguistic theory, particularly for proposed distinctions between the lexicon, morphology, and syntax. This volume focuses on the mapping from morphosyntactic structures to event structure, and in particular the constraints on possible mappings. The volume showcases the 'coverb construction', a complex predicate construction which, though widespread, has received little attention in the literature. The coverb construction contrasts with more familiar serial verb constructions. The coverb construction generally maps only to event structures like those of monomorphemic verbs, whereas serial verb constructions map to a range of event structures differing from those of monomorphemic verbs. The volume coverage is truly cross-linguistic, including languages from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, East Africa and North America. The volume establishes a new arena of research in event structure, syntax, and cross-linguistic typology.

The Linguistics of Eating and Drinking

This volume reviews a range of fascinating linguistic facts about ingestive predicates in the world’s languages. The highly multifaceted nature of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ events gives rise to interesting clausal properties of these predicates, such as the atypicality of transitive constructions involving ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ in some languages. The two verbs are also sources for a large number of figurative uses across languages with meanings such as ‘destroy’, and ‘savour’, as well as participating in a great variety of idioms which can be quite opaque semantically. Grammaticalized extensions of these predicates also occur, such as the quantificational use of Hausa shaa 'drink’ meaning (roughly) ‘do X frequently, regularly’. Specialists discuss details of the use of these verbs in a variety of languages and language families: Australian languages, Papuan languages, Athapaskan languages, Japanese, Korean, Hausa, Amharic, Hindi-Urdu, and Marathi.