Andrew Koontz-Garboden

Animacy encoding in English: why and how

We report on two recent medium-scale initiatives annotating present day English corpora for animacy distinctions. We discuss the relevance of animacy for computational linguistics, specifically generation, the annotation categories used in the two studies and the interannotator reliability for one of the studies.

Manner and Result in the Roots of Verbal Meaning

Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2010) argue that verbs fall into (at least) two classes: result verbs (e.g., break) and manner verbs (e.g., run). No verb encodes both manner and result simultaneously, a truth-conditional fact that Rappaport Hovav and Levin argue follows from how verb meanings are composed at the level of event structure. However, a key issue in verifying this claim is isolating truth-conditional diagnostics for manner and result. We develop and review a number of such diagnostics and show that there are verbs that encode both meanings together, counterexemplifying their truth-conditional complementarity. However, using evidence from scopal adverbs, we argue that when the meanings occur together, they are encoded in a single, undecomposable manner+result root at event structure. This fact validates complementarity as a fact about how many and what types of roots may occur in an event structure, though it also argues for a richer typology of roots than is typically assumed, including those encoding manner and result simultaneously.

On the typology of state/change of state alternations

This paper examines the morphological and lexical semantic typology of the relationship between words denoting states and their associated changes of state. Two empirical findings emerge. First, while words denoting property concept states (Dixon 1982) are morphologically basic, this is not always the case for words denoting result states (states entailing an event giving rise to the state). Second, a single word can be polysemous between a property concept state and change of state denotation only in languages where property concepts are lexicalized as verbs. The first generalization is explained by observing that property concepts and result states have differing lexical semantics—while result states presuppose a prior change, property concepts do not. This asymmetry in morphological encoding is expected given the Principle of Monotonic Composition (Olsen 1996; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998), according to which meaning can be added in word formation but never removed or changed. The second generalization follows from the idea that only verbs can denote changes of state. This idea is fleshed out via lexical decomposition and by appealing to a recent idea due to Lieber (2004) whereby the highest operator in a lexical decomposition determines lexical categoryhood. Implications of the empirical findings and analysis are discussed alongside areas for future research.

Aspectual coercion and the typology of change of state predicates

The point of departure of this paper is the consideration of how words with the meanings of property concept states (states that are lexicalized as adjectives in languages that have that lexical category, cf. Dixon 1982), e.g. ‘red’, are related to words denoting their corresponding change of state, e.g. ‘redden’. It is shown that while many languages relate words with these meanings to one another via some morpholexical process, this is not so in the Polynesian language Tongan. A detailed case study shows that in this language there are no non-causative change of state lexemes based on property concepts. Rather, these meanings are derived pragmatically from verbs denoting the corresponding state via aspectual coercion (Moens & Steedman 1988, Jackendo! 1997, de Swart 1998, Zucchi 1998, Michaelis 2004). This finding is shown to have consequences for the understanding of the typology of change of state predicates (Koontz-Garboden 2005, 2006, Koontz-Garboden & Levin 2005) and for theories of event structure: (a) the typological space is broader than previously thought and (b) theories of event structure need to be reconsidered in order to account for the postlexical derivation of meaning.

Ulwa Verb Class Morphology

This paper provides a detailed description and analysis of Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua) verb class morphology. Taking as a point of departure the previous literature on the topic (Hale and Salamanca 2002, Hale and Keyser 2002, and Juarros 2003), I show that the facts are more complicated than has been appreciated, and that previous theoretical claims based on facts from the language are not justified. The verb class markers -ta- and -pa-, I argue, are verbalizers of precategorial roots, while -da- and -wa- are shown to serve, among other functions, as anticausativizers. The contrast in the two broad classes of verb class marker is shown to have significant consequences for the lexical semantics, syntax, and morphology of verbs in the language, leading to an understanding of a range of previously poorly understood and undocumented facts of the language.

Locative and Existential Constructions in Ulwa

This article lays out the morphosyntactic and semantic facts of existential and locative constructions in Ulwa (Misumalpan; Nicaragua). Locative constructions come in two types—those that take one of a small set of posture predicates, and those that are completely bare, having only a figure and locative (postpositional phrase) nonverbal predicate. The posture predicates constitute a distinct syntactic category. Among the posture predicates, ‘sit’ is special in being polysemous, having both a locative and more semantically bleached existential meaning. Bare locative constructions do not have the existential meaning of the bleached ‘sit’ construction; rather, they have a pure locative meaning.

A Universal Pronoun in English

(1) a. Rundgren’s shit is only fuckin’ good when his ass sings pop. . . . You and I see shit the fuckin’ same way. I can dig partying with your ass. ( he sings pop, I can dig partying with you) [rec.music.progressive, 03-12-98] b. The poster claimed that HE paid for gas. In reality, every time his ass drives his car where he doesn’t need to go, WE pay for it . . . ( he drives his car) [alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, 07-02-97] c. their asses sure know how to fuckin’ jam. kick ass guitar, whaling keys, and fuckin’ screetching ass voices! dig it. fuckin’ a. after the fuckin’ jam was over my ass handed the old chick her ten fuckin’ bucks. . . . his ass claimed that his old lady gave him the fuckin’ bucks to fuckin’ buy an ice cream sandwich. . . . i told his ass i needed the fuckin’ money in order to fuckin’ buy some beer. shit. my ass ain’t ready to rip off texaco quite yet. ( they know, I handed, I told him, I’m not ready) [alt.music.yes, 04-01-00] d. Nah, I don’t think so. . . . I got my baseball bat right by the bed so I can smash its ass [ a doll], Chucky-style. ( smash it) [forums.yellowworld.org/archive/index.php/t-15055 .html]