Verbs and Constructions: Where Next?

Constructional and projectionist approaches are often contrasted, yet both incorporate the same important assumption about the nature of the meaning of sentences with verbs and their arguments, although they differ in how much meaning is allocated to the syntax and how much to the lexicon. FOCUS OF THE TALK: a facet of meaning that both approaches see as lexical, a notion of core meaning or root—i.e., what differentiates break from shatter. BOTTOM LINE: A verb's lexical semantic representation determines the morphosyntactic realization of its arguments. A lexical semantic template—now often called an event structure—which a verb shares with other verbs in the same semantic class, is one of two components of verb meaning. The other is an idiosyncratic part of meaning or " root " , which distinguishes a verb from other verbs in its class.