Abstract
Hit-verbs have three basic meaning components, namely movement, contact and force (e.g. [12], Levin 1993), which interact with the verbs’ argument structure in various ways. In this paper, we map out the different grammatical constructions of the German verb schlagen (usually, though loosely, translated as ‘hit’; also ‘beat’, ‘strike’) and their restrictions on agentivity and the force component. Using modification by pure manner adverbs as a tool to test for possible default values of the force component, and agent-oriented adverbs to discover possible interactions with agentivity, we show that German schlagen is rather liberal with respect to its force component. Crucially, the force component may not only be modified by standard, force-denoting manner adverbs such as lightly and hard, but also through agent-oriented adverbs such as playfully, via a defeasible inference. We show further that our findings can be profitably modelled in Frame Semantics, a framework which is especially well suited for modelling a fine-grained decomposition of word meaning, including the manner-related components of verbs.
This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) with a grant to the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 991 “The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science”, Projects B09 and C10 (Sebastian Löbner and Wiebke Petersen). Additionally, part of the work was funded by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) (to Anja Goldschmidt). The final version of the paper has profited from the comments of two anonymous reviewers, and from discussion with Sebastian Löbner on the frame modelling. We also thank the audience at the 11th TbiLLC Symposium for their feedback on an earlier version. We would like to acknowledge the help of the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics’ (UiL OTS) statistics advisor, Kirsten Schutter-Pessoa, with the questionnaire data. The order of the authors is chronological, as they joined in at different stages of the project.
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Notes
- 1.
Following Vogel (2016) [17], the variant with an accusative object plus a goal PP can be subsumed here as an extended version of the simple transitive construction.
- 2.
Technically, a feature can be defined as an attribute-value pair.
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A Appendix — Example Sentences from the Questionnaires
A Appendix — Example Sentences from the Questionnaires
Sentences testing expectations arising about the force magnitude in the transitive and unaccusative constructions:
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Sophia schlägt Simon hart.
‘Sophia hits Simon hard.’
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Chris schlägt Alex leicht.
‘Chris hits Alex lightly.’
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Julia schlägt Tobias, aber hart.
‘Julia hits Tobias, but hard.’
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Tobias schlägt Maike, aber leicht.
‘Tobias hits Maike, but lightly.’
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Die Gitarre schlägt hart gegen die Tischkante.
‘The guitar hits the edge of the table hard.’
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Die Gitarre schlägt leicht gegen die Tischkante.
‘The guitar hits the edge of the table lightly.’
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Der Zweig schlägt gegen die Hauswand, aber hart.
‘The branch hits the wall of the house, but hard.’
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Der Zweig schlägt gegen die Hauswand, aber leicht.
‘The branch hits the wall of the house, but lightly.’
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Die Wellen schlagen hart gegen den Deich.
‘The waves hit the dyke hard.’
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Die Wellen schlagen gegen den Deich, aber leicht.
‘The waves hit the dyke, but lightly.’
Sentences testing predictions of the agentivity hypothesis:
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Andrea schlägt Jan spielerisch auf den Arm.
‘Andrea hits Jan playfully on the arm.’
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Chris schlägt Alex leicht auf den Arm.
‘Chris hits Alex lightly on the arm.’
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Die Gitarre schlägt spielerisch gegen die Tischkante.
‘The guitar hits the edge of the table playfully.’
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Der Zweig schlägt leicht gegen die Hauswand.
‘The branch hits the wall of the house lightly.’
Sentences testing predictions of the force inference hypothesis:
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Andrea schlägt Jan spielerisch, aber doch recht leicht, auf den Arm.
‘Andrea hits Jan playfully, but still rather lightly, on the arm.’
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Andrea schlägt Jan spielerisch, aber doch recht hart, auf den Arm.
‘Andrea hits Jan playfully, but still rather hard, on the arm.’
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Goldschmidt, A., Gamerschlag, T., Petersen, W., Gabrovska, E., Geuder, W. (2017). Towards Verb Modification in Frames. In: Hansen, H., Murray, S., Sadrzadeh, M., Zeevat, H. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10148. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54332-0_2
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