In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning. The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments. The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part. Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references. The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory. Easy to use, English Verb Classes and Alternations sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language.

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, Free University of Berlin (Anglistics), course: Seminar Verb classes and alternations, language: English, abstract: [...] “This work is guided by the assumption that the behaviour of verb, particularly with respect to the expression and interpretation of its arguments, is to a large extent determined by its meaning.” (Levin 1993) [Levin tries to develop a system which enables the speaker to determine the behaviour of a verb by its meaning] Levin points out that a native speaker is able to make subtle judgements about the syntactic behaviour of a verb. She hypothesises that it is the meaning of the verb which enables the speaker to make such judgements about a verb’s syntactic behaviour. //In particular, the ability of a verb to exist in certain syntactic frames or constructions (see examples below) is sensitive to certain components of meaning. The book aims to establish the relevant components of meaning, and thereby classify the English verbs into classes of shared behaviour and meaning. Levin (1993:.. following ... 1987) uses the verb “gally” - a nearly obsolete whaling term little-known to native speakers - to illustrate this relationship between a verb’s meaning and its syntactic behaviour. [...]

This volume brings together fourteen papers which explore the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, morphological and syntactic factors involved in English morphosyntactic alternations. The contributors to this volume deal with different types of "diathesis alternations" --broadly defined by Levin (English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, 1993) as "alternations in the expressions of arguments, sometimes accompanied by changes of meaning" --i.e. transitivity alternations (such as the causative/inchoative alternation and the conative alternation), alternations involving arguments within the VP (such as the Swarm-alternation, and the dative or benefactive alternations), etc. The volume will also include some contributions dealing more generally with the issues of morphological relatedness and verb-specific alternations within functionalist, cognitive and/or constructionist frameworks. The book features a wide range of theoretical approaches, ranging from functionalist models such as Functional Discourse Grammar or the Cardiff Grammar version of Systemic Functional Linguistics to more cognitively-oriented approaches such as Goldberg's Construction Grammar or Fillmore's Frame Semantics. This attempt to describe morphosyntactic alternations within different contemporary theories¬¬ --derivational and non-derivational-- will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic phenomena traditionally subsumed under the rubric of morphosyntactic alternation. The book will be of interest to experienced linguists and researchers of a functionalist, cognitivist or even functional-typological persuasion.

The aim of the present volume is two-fold: to give a coherent account of the locative alternation in English, and to develop a constructional theory that overcomes a number of problems in earlier constructional accounts. The lexical-constructional account proposed here is characterized by two main features. On the one hand, it emphasizes the need for a detailed examination of verb meanings. On the other, it introduces lower-level constructions such as verb-class-specific constructions and verb-specific constructions, and makes full use of these lower-level constructions in accounting for alternation phenomena. Rather than being a completely new version of construction grammar, the proposed lexical-constructional account is an automatic consequence of the basic tenet of constructional approaches as being usage-based.

A lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach to meaning in language that distinguishes between patterns of normal use and creative exploitations of norms. In Lexical Analysis, Patrick Hanks offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. The book fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people understand how words go together in collocational patterns and constructions to make meanings. Such an approach is now possible, Hanks writes, because of the availability of new forms of evidence (corpora, the Internet) and the development of new methods of statistical analysis and inferencing. Hanks offers a new theory of language, the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (TNE), which makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal usage—between rules for using words normally and rules for exploiting such norms in metaphor and other creative use of language. Using hundreds of carefully chosen citations from corpora and other texts, he shows how matching each use of a word against established contextual patterns plays a large part in determining the meaning of an utterance. His goal is to develop a coherent and practical lexically driven theory of language that takes into account the immense variability of everyday usage and that shows that this variability is rule governed rather than random. Such a theory will complement other theoretical approaches to language, including cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, generative lexicon theory, priming theory, and pattern grammar.

These lively lectures introduce the theory, practice and application of a versatile, rigorous and non Anglocentic approach to cross-linguistic semantics. Topics include semantic primes and molecules, emotions, evaluation, verbs and event structure, cultural key words and scripts, language teaching.