Thomas Gamerschlag

Why Chocolate Eggs Can Taste Old but Not Oval: A Frame-Theoretic Analysis of Inferential Evidentials

So-called phenomenon-based perception verbs such as ‘sound, taste (of)’, and ‘look (like)’ allow for a use in inferential evidential constructions of the type ‘The chocolate egg tastes old’. In this paper, we propose a frame-theoretic analysis of this use in which we pursue the question how well-formed inferential uses can be discriminated from awkward uses such as #‘The chocolate egg tastes oval’. We argue that object knowledge plays a central role in this respect and that this knowledge is ideally captured in frame representations in which object properties are easily translated into attributes such as TASTE, smell, age, and form. We represent the more general knowledge of the range and domain of the attributes in a type signature. In principle, an inference is recognized as admissible if the values of one attribute can be inferred from the values of another attribute. In the analysis, this kind of inferability is modeled as an inference structure defined on the type signature. The definitions of type signatures and inference structures enable us to establish two constraints which are sufficient to discriminate the admissible and inadmissible uses of phenomenon-based perception verbs in simple subject-verb-adjective constructions.

Constraining the Combinatorial Patterns of Japanese V-V Compounds: An Analysis in Dynamic Event Semantics

In this article we investigate the argument structure of Japanese V-V compounds from the perspective of Dynamic Event Semantics (Naumann 2001). The argument structure of a verb is defined as a linearly ordered set of so-called dynamic roles. Dynamic roles differ from thematic relations in characterizing participants in terms of sets of results that are brought about in the course of an event. The patterns of argument sharing found in Japanese V-V compounds are shown to derive from compatibility constraints on the different results that are assigned to a shared argument. In addition, it is argued that the phenomenon of argument blocking follows from the Subject-Head Constraint (Gamerschlag 2000, 2002). This constraint requires the highest argument (= subject) of the head verb to be the highest argument of the compound.

A frame-analysis of the interplay of grammar and cognition in emission verbs

Abstract Most decompositional approaches are confined to representing event structural properties whereas the idiosyncratic lexical content is often reduced to an unanalyzed atomic root. While approaches of this type are successfully applied to argument linking and some additional grammatical phenomena, we argue that other grammatically relevant aspects of verb behavior cannot be accounted for in this way. In order to illustrate the limits of ‘traditional’ decompositional accounts, we focus on the class of verbs of emission. Verbs of this class exhibit some grammatical asymmetries whose analysis requires lexical decomposition beyond traditional event structure templates. We argue that frames are a suitable format for extending event structure templates and provide an analysis of the phenomena at issue.

Towards Verb Modification in Frames

Hit-verbs have three basic meaning components, namely movement, contact and force (e.g. [12], Levin 1993), which interact with the verbs’ argument structure in various ways. In this paper, we map out the different grammatical constructions of the German verb schlagen (usually, though loosely, translated as ‘hit’; also ‘beat’, ‘strike’) and their restrictions on agentivity and the force component. Using modification by pure manner adverbs as a tool to test for possible default values of the force component, and agent-oriented adverbs to discover possible interactions with agentivity, we show that German schlagen is rather liberal with respect to its force component. Crucially, the force component may not only be modified by standard, force-denoting manner adverbs such as lightly and hard, but also through agent-oriented adverbs such as playfully, via a defeasible inference. We show further that our findings can be profitably modelled in Frame Semantics, a framework which is especially well suited for modelling a fine-grained decomposition of word meaning, including the manner-related components of verbs.

Analyzing stative dimensional verbs in frames

Abstract In this paper we discuss the class of stative dimensional verbs. Stative verbs of this type such as German wiegen ‘weigh’ and heisen ‘be called’ encode a dimension such as weight and name and additionally allow for the specification of a value along this dimension. We present frame analyses of posture verbs such as liegen ‘lie’ and stimulus subject perception verbs such as klingen ‘sound’, which constitute two prominent subclasses of German SDVs. We argue that a proper account of both types of SDVs requires explicit reference to the encoded dimension. It will be shown that frame representations are especially apt for that purpose since SDVs can easily be translated into attribute-value pairs, which are the building units of frames