The Meaning of Verbal Roots Across Languages

语言不仅是一种交流手段，也是人类感知世界的窗口。动词一直是人类如何对事件进行分类的丰富信息来源，动词意义研究的一个诱人结果是，动词可能具有的意义不是任意的。更确切地说，有一些重复出现的具有高度普遍性的意义成分，它们根据所描述的广泛的情景类型（包括因果关系、身体行为和占有）来定义动词的类别，并且一类中的动词往往具有共同的语法行为。一个类别中的单个动词通过特殊的细节来区分，这些细节填补了更广泛情况的细节，例如特定动作的名称，通常很少有语法分支。然而，一般和特殊成分如何在动词的意义上联合收割机仍然没有得到很好的理解，也不是什么空间的特殊意义的一个类别中的一个单独的动词可以有，包括如何区分一般和动词的具体意义。理解这些问题对我们理解人类语言具有重要意义，并且可以服务于实际目的，特别是与搜索引擎技术和机器翻译有关的目的。本项目通过研究描述状态变化（例如，break，redden）和导致拥有（例如，give，send）的动词的特殊含义来解决这些空白，这些动词被认为可以消除特殊含义的可能限制。该方法涉及（一）在深入研究这些动词在英语和基尼亚卢旺达语（选择其丰富的动词形态），后者通过实地考察，及（二）广泛的调查，改变状态的动词在一个谱系平衡的100语言样本从现有的出版参考资料。目标是通过推理和形态模式来分离动词的一般意义和特殊意义。结果将被整合到一个理论，如何动词的意义是组成使用现代技术的组成语义。基于试验数据的期望是，虽然特质意义不限于其字面内容，但它们与动词其他意义的关系属于有限的类型，对可能和不可能的动词做出一些预测。

Language serves not just as a means of communication but also a window into how humans perceive the world. Verbs have been a rich source of information about how humans categorize events, and one tantalizing result of work on verb meaning is that the possible meanings a verb can have are not arbitrary. Rather, there are recurring meaning components of high generality that define classes of verbs according to the broad situation type being described, including cause and effect, bodily action, and possession, and verbs within a class tend to have shared grammatical behaviors. Individual verbs within a class are distinguished by idiosyncratic details that fill in the specifics of the broader situation, e.g. the name of a specific action, usually with few grammatical ramifications. However, how general and idiosyncratic components combine in the meaning of a verb is still not well understood, nor is the space of what idiosyncratic meanings an individual verb within a class can have, including how distinct general and verb-specific meanings even are. Understanding these issues has consequences for our understanding of human languages, and can serve practical purposes, particularly in relation to search engine technology and machine translation.This project addresses these lacunae by examining the idiosyncratic meanings of verbs describing change-of-state (e.g. break, redden) and caused possession (e.g. give, send), which have been claimed to exemplify possible limits on idiosyncratic meanings. The methodology involves (i) in depth studies of these verbs in English and Kinyarwanda (chosen for its rich verbal morphology), the latter through field work, and (ii) a broad survey of change-of-state verbs in a genealogically balanced 100 language sample drawn from existing published reference materials. The goal is to isolate general and idiosyncratic meaning in verbs through inferential and morphological patterns. The results will be integrated into a theory of how verb meanings are composed using modern techniques in compositional semantics. The expectation based on pilot data is that while idiosyncratic meanings are not limited in terms of their literal content, they fall into limited types regarding their relation to the rest of the verb's meaning, making some predictions about possible and impossible verbs.