An Extended Lexical Relation Structure Treatment of Denominal Verbs

초록

Clark and Clark (1979) observe that English denominal verbs include eight categories that can be exemplified with the following examples: (1) a. We will blanket the bed [placeables] b. Jack will kennel the dog in an hour [places] c. I want to summer in Paris [time intervals] d. He butchered the cow skillfully [agents] e. Many people witnessed the accident [receivers] f. The pharmacist powdered the pills of aspirin [results] g. John worded his opinions very carefully [antecedents] h. The policeman handcuffed the thief quickly [instrument] Works like this have given rise to the question what are possible words in a particular language like English. Hale and Keyser (1993a), among others, have proposed that a restricted Lexical Relational Structure (or LRS) theory on argument structure can answer the question on possible words as far as the first two categories illustrated in (1): verbs of locatum and verbs of location, in their terms. They do not attempt to treat the other categories under the same approach. This paper is an attempt to extend their LRS treatment of locatum and location verbs to denominal verbs of the other categories. It will try to show how exactly the same treatment can be applied to some of them, and how their "adverbial" and "referential" components can subsume many others. Then, it will examine some of the consequences of this extension, for example, with regard to the syntactic distribution of the so-called verbs of manner of communication as in (2). (2) John whispered that he was a liar.