A Lexical-Constructional Analysis of Verbs of Speech

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an analysis of a group of English verbs of speech. The study has been carried out within the theoretical framework provided by the Lexical- Constructional Model as developed by Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal (2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b), and Mairal and Ruiz de Mendoza (2009) which offers a bridge between projectionist theories of language such as Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin, 1997, 2005) and constructional theories such as those put forward by Goldberg (1995) and Michaelis (2003). The syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasy of the verbs of speech under scrutiny is captured by means of lexical templates, which are subsumed into the higher-level constructional templates for the caused motion and caused motion with way constructions (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Levin, 1993). A number of internal and external constraints based on semantic, cognitive, and pragmatic aspects of the meaning of the verbs have been shown to determine the degree of compatibility that exists between different sub categories of verbs of speech and the two aforementioned constructions.