Evidence for the Psychological Reality of Semantic Components: The Verbs of Possession

This chapter is concerned with the way verbs are stored and processed. I use a set of possession verbs as illustrative examples. The first section of the chapter deals with the structural representation of these verbs. The remainder of the chapter is concerned with issues of processing and with experimental tests of the theory. In this chapter I use the terms "components" and "chunks" to refer to the underlying semantic units of verbs, rather than the term "primi-tive elements," which is used iii the other chapters of this book. 1 make this change to emphasize that the components analyzed in this chapter need not necessarily represent the members of some universal set of innate semantic features. If such a set exists, most of the components that are described in this chapter are probably combinations of the innate features. The two main linguistic treatments of the possession verbs are those by Bendix (1966) and Fillmore (1966). Bendix proposed a general analysis of verbs of possession, and in a critique of this work, Fillmore suggested some alternative representations. Schank and his collaborators have also studied verbs of possession (Schank, Goldman, Rie-ger, and Riesbeck, 1972). My treatment differs from all three of these approaches, although it has some points in common with each.