The Meaning of Verbal Roots Across Languages is a multi-year cross-linguistic and typological study in the nature of verb meaning and the universal principles that determine what kinds of verb meanings are possible and impossible in the world’s languages. In this project, we explore the distinction between the general, recurring eventive meanings found in broad classes of verbs such as action, cause, and effect, and the idiosyncratic meaning — the “root” — that distinguishes verbs within a class and makes every verb unique. For example, the transitive verbs break and shatter are both verbs describing caused changes of state (the recurring meaning), but differ in their idiosyncratic root meanings, namely what kind of state results from the event. Much recent theorizing on verb meaning has suggested that the general, recurring eventive components of a verb’s meaning are partly grammaticalized: they are part and parcel of a verb’s syntactic and morphological properties (such as how many arguments the verb takes and what its morphological structure is). Verbs sharing the same broad event types will thus typically have similar grammatical properties. The idiosyncratic meaning of an individual verb simply fills in the real world details about particular actions and states, but is usually assumed not to introduce broad eventive notions like cause or change, and also does not determining much of the verb’s grammatical properties beyond just figuring into the idiosyncratic morphological root of each unique verb.
The goal of this project is to explore the ways in which idiosyncratic roots can introduce broad, general eventive notions, and further how these meanings figure into a verb’s grammatical properties. If the roots of verbs can introduce the same types of grammatical meanings, then this raises significant questions about what kinds of correlations we expect to find between what a verb means and its grammar and also how the various components of a verb’s meaning compose into a single meaning given that there may be redundancy across the parts. Our central case studies are the roots of change-of-state verbs and ditransitive verbs of caused possession. The case study on change-of-state verbs involved as a component a typological study on the the morphological forms of such verbs. The goal of this website is to provide access to these data.
More specifically, we proposed that there are two types of change-of-state verbs across the languages of the world: those that describe outcomes that only arise as a result of some process (e.g. crack) and those that may exist independent of any such process (e.g. redden). Part of the evidence is that the two types of roots tend to show distinct morphological properties. The data that demonstrates this comes from verbal and stative paradigms for the translations of 85 root translations split across the two types in 88 languages in a balanced sample, looking at five overt root forms: the simple stative use of the root (e.g. red), the inchoative (e.g. intransitive redden), the causative (e.g. transitive redden), and the result state use (e.g. reddened), plus any underlying bound root that may exist for languages that rely heavily on such morphological objects. To date the data we have collected show that the distinction between root category (crack vs. red roots) is grammatically significant across languages: the roots of crack-type verbs (which we call “result roots”) tend to lack simple stative forms and show unmarked verbal forms, while the roots of red-type verbs tend to have simple stative forms and shows marked verbal forms.
See the Publications page for further references on our work. Additionally, see the Project Details page for a more technical description of our study and the Data Collection Guide for more information on how we collected these paradigms.
Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. BCS-1451765.
Our group would also like to acknowledge our web designer, Stacy Vlasits, and the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS) at The University of Texas at Austin. We would not have been able to share our data so easily with the public without such a useful interactive tool.
The website’s data was last updated on October 9, 2020.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.