How do you smile along a path?: Bodies and the semantic content of unergative roots

This paper argues that a core component of root meaning is the distinction between body parts versus the body conceived as a whole. This distinction is shown to be relevant in the acceptability of motion sentences in English with whole-body roots like d a n c e $\sqrt {\textsc{dance}} $ and body-par...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistic review 2019-09, Vol.36 (3), p.343-363
Main Author: Irwin, Patricia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acceptability
Argument structure
Contextual effects
English language
Lexical semantics
Linguistics
Motion
Roots (Morphology)
Syntactic structures
Syntax
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Summary:This paper argues that a core component of root meaning is the distinction between body parts versus the body conceived as a whole. This distinction is shown to be relevant in the acceptability of motion sentences in English with whole-body roots like d a n c e $\sqrt {\textsc{dance}} $ and body-part roots like s m i l e $\sqrt {\textsc{smile}} $ . In keeping with the assumption that roots lack syntactic category, I argue that verbal roots occur freely in syntactic structures but that some root-structure combinations are degraded (or unacceptable), and that this is due to an incompatibility between conceptual root content and interpreted syntactic structure.
ISSN:0167-6318
1613-3676
DOI:10.1515/tlr-2019-2021