Theories of lexical semantics and syntactic decomposition usually make a
distinction between the role of the 'idiosyncratic' lexical component of
words, the 'constant' or 'root', and that of the functional elements which
are shared between different members of a word class. Understanding the
properties of such lexical building blocks is central to our understanding
of language. However, most work thus far has focused on the functional
building blocks. In particular, there has been little work addressing the
formal semantics of lexical roots. In this dissertation, I focus on a
particular class of verbs, implicit creation verbs, and argue that these
are derived from roots which denote predicates of individuals. These verbs
are contrasted with verbs derived from roots of different types, toward the
goal of developing a complete ontology of roots. I argue that many of the
generalizations derived in other work from syntactic categories can in fact
be derived from semantic root type. The analysis presented for the
compositional construction of verbs has consequences for the nature of
lexical decomposition, the analysis of resultative secondary predicates,
the analysis of verb particles, and the relationship between syntactic and
semantic categories.
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