Josep Ausensi (URV): ‘A contextual allosemy approach to optionally causative manner verbs in Catalan’

Seminari del CLT

Divendres, 24 d’abril de 2026
Hora 15:30
Seminari en línia

Abstract:
In this talk, I will analyze a class of verbs in Catalan, dubbed Optionally Causative Manner Verbs (OCMVs) following Alexiadou et al. (2017), which display a context- dependent alternation between manner and result interpretations. While canonical manner verbs such as wipe do not lexically entail a result (Rappaport Hovav & Levin, 2010), OCMVs such as rentar ‘wash’ exhibit result entailments in non-agentive contexts and manner entailments in agentive contexts. Adopting a contextual allosemy approach (Wood & Marantz, 2017; Hopperdietzel, 2024; Zhu & Yu, 2024), I will propose that Catalan OCMVs instantiate Manner/Result Polysemy (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2013, 2014; Hopperdietzel, 2024) as their roots are polysemous. Namely, the roots of OCMVs are associated with two distinct allosemes: an eventive (manner) alloseme selected in agentive contexts and a stative (result) alloseme is selected in non-agentive contexts. Unlike Alexiadou et al.’s (2017) analysis of French OCMVs, which posits that a silent result head is added in non-agentive contexts, the present approach treats manner and result interpretations as mutually exclusive realizations of the root itself, and accounts for the agent vs. causer contrast while preserving Manner/Result Complementarity (Rappaport Hovav & Levin, 2010).