Properties of Main Verbs

What is it about?

A set of properties is proposed as characteristic of main verbs, able to identify a particular constituent in a sentence as its main verb. These properties are in turn applied to the framing typology of Talmy (2000b), in which languages fall into two categories based on whether they characteristically express the Path component of a Motion event in the verb (verb-framed languages) or in the satellite and/or preposition (satellite-framed languages). Slobin (2004) later held that certain languages do not fall neatly into either category of this typology, either because the lexical category of the Path constituent is unclear, or because the Path and coevent constituents are both verbs or both satellites. He classed such languages together as being “equipollently framed”, exhibiting a third category of the typology. We dispute most of these claims of equipollent framing, demonstrating how these languages are actually either verb-framed or satellite-framed.

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