Description
Book SynopsisThis book makes an original contribution to the understanding of perception verbs and the treatment of argument structure, and offers new insights on lexical causation, evidentiality, and processes of cognition. Perception verbs - such as look, see, taste, hear, feel, sound, and listen - present unresolved problems for theories of lexical semantics. This book examines the relations between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in verbs like seem and sound. In unravelling their complexity Nikolas Gisborne looks closely at their meanings, modality, semantic relatedness, and irregularity. He frames his exposition in Word Grammar, and draws extensively on work in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. After an opening chapter explaining the nature of the issues, Dr Gisborne presents a concise introduction to Word Grammar. He then considers the implications of his approach for a general theory of event s
Trade ReviewThe fact that Gisborne commits himself to English does not undermine the book's usefulness to other languages. It will be a valuable reference work for linguists interested in areas of lexical semantics including causation, argument-linking, and polysemy. It is clearly written and well argued... This book is rich in argumentation and presents interesting data that provides more comprehensive understanding of English perception verbs. * SIL Electronic Book Reviews *
Table of Contents1. Introduction ; 2. Word Grammar ; 3. Causation and Relations Between Events: An Introduction to Word Grammar Semantics ; 4. Network Structure and the Polysemy of SEE ; 5. Perception Verbs and the Semantics of Content ; 6. Non-finite Complementation ; 7. SOUND-class Verbs ; 8. Conclusion ; References
