The contribution of rootsthe division of labor between grammar and the lexicon in meaning composition

Résumé

This dissertation explores the division of labor between grammar and the lexicon from the viewpoint of event structural theories which takeverbmean-ings to decompose into event templates and roots. Event templates define the temporal and causal structure of the event, while roots fill in real-world details. On this view, the semantics of the whole syntactic structure and the grammatical properties of the verbs are solely determined by the event tem-plates, and never by roots. In this dissertation, I argue against this strong division of labor by showing that roots play a bigger role in grammar and meaning composition. I argue in favor of an event structural theory of verb meaning in which the contributions of event templates and roots are not mutually exclusive, but complement each other with grammatical conse-quences. Namely, root-specific entailments are shown to be grammatically relevant insofar as they restrict the syntactic structure and in turn determine the grammatical properties of verbs. I argue thus in favor of an event structural approach which needs to be sensitive to the semantic contribution of roots insofar as roots impose restrictions on their syntactic contexts. This dissertation is divided into two parts. Part I “The nature of verb and root meaning” explores the nature of verb and root meaning and whether there are constraints that limit how much or what types of meaning verbs and roots can have. Part I consists of Chapter 2 that explores the question of (im)possible verb meanings and Chapter 3 that looks into the types of meaning roots can have in more detail. Part II “The architecture of event structure” discusses the interaction of root meaning with the event structure and consists of Chapter 4 that examines the division of labor between roots and event templates with regard to the expression of resultativity and Chapter 5 that looks into the syntactic distribution of roots in the event structure. Last, Chapter 6 explores how root meaning can interact with the syntactic structure in more detail and provides some concluding remarks.