"While the work of Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960) has had an important influence on French linguistics, his theory is not yet well-known in the English-speaking world. Lessons on the English Verb provides a comprehensive treatment of the English verbal system within a Guillaumean theoretical framework - an approach unprecedented in its systemic scope." --Résumé de l'éditeur.

In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning. The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments. The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part. Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references. The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory. Easy to use, English Verb Classes and Alternations sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language.

Guiding learners to acquire sufficient knowledge of grammar constitutes an interesting domain in the field of teaching English as a second language. This research-based resource book focuses on the learning of English tenses and verbal categories, which forms a huge and fascinating component of English grammar that merits attention in teachers’ attempts to improve their students’ English proficiency. Inspired by concepts relating to explicit learning, consciousness raising, contrastive analysis and error analysis, the author used a wealth of data derived from a set of elicitation procedures to reveal the linguistic interference encountered by second language learners. Arguing for the need to conceptualise grammatical rules positively, this inquiry focuses on studying learners’ wide-ranging responses to a large number of items designed to explore linguistic interference in the learning of English verb forms in eight major categories. The findings, explanations and illustration-based recommendations provided in this volume will give trainee teachers, instructors and researchers deeper insights into how strategies can be aptly employed to enhance learners’ performance in using English verb forms and related grammatical categories, which constitute a key dimension in the learning and teaching of English as a second language.

No detailed description available for "The English Verb System".

In Motion and the English Verb, a study of the expression of motion in medieval English, Judith Huber provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English, and discusses these in terms of the manner-salience of early English. Huber demonstrates how several non-motion verbs receive contextual motion meanings through their use in the intransitive motion construction. In addition, she analyzes which verbs and structures are employed most frequently in talking about motion in select Old and Middle English texts, demonstrating that while satellite-framing is stable, the extent of manner-conflation is influenced by text type and style. Huber further investigates how in the intertypological contact with medieval French, a range of French path verbs (entrer, issir, descendre, etc.) were incorporated into Middle English, in whose system of motion encoding they are semantically unusual. Their integration into Middle English is studied in an innovative approach which analyzes their usage contexts in autonomous Middle English texts as opposed to translations from French and Latin. Huber explains how these verbs were initially borrowed not for expressing general literal motion, but in more specific, often metaphorical and abstract contexts. Her study is a diachronic contribution to the typology of motion encoding, and advances research on the process of borrowing and loanword integration.

This study continues the adaptation of the method of Case Frame analysis for the investigation of the Greek text of the New Testament. Case Frame analysis distinguishes the words of a language into two categories, predicators [words that require completion by other words for their correct grammatical use] and non-predicators [words that do not require such completion], and provides rigorous procedures for describing the syntactic, semantic, and lexical requirements that predicators impose on the words that complete their meaning. The inclusion of semantic function and feature descriptions in Case Frame analysis permits the development of a new genre of lexicon that specifies not only syntactic and lexical information (as do traditional dictionaries) but detailed semantic information. The resulting Case Frame lexicon entries are both more compact and more nuanced than traditional lexicon entries. Danove conducts an exhaustive Case Frame analysis of the ditransitive verbs of transference in the New Testament. He uses this analysis to develop a set of descriptive guidelines for interpreting and translating the various usages of ditransitive verbs of transference and applies these rules in exegetical studies of the text of the New Testament to generate a Case Frame lexicon of the verbs of transference in the New Testament. This study will distinguish the requirements of the 127 New Testament verbs of transference according to four syntactic functions, twelve semantic functions, and 22 lexical realizations. This will permit a rigorous investigation of all occurrences of verbal complements with the same syntactic, semantic, and lexical attributes. The study also will consider the influence of one semantic feature [an inherent quality of words that has implications for their lexical realization] and of the ‘intrusion' of four grammatical constructions [inherent structuring templates of grammar that govern syntactic, semantic, and lexical attributes and modify meaning] on each category of complements with the same syntactic, semantic and lexical description. This will produce a rigorous description of meaning that becomes the basis for Danove's contributions to the linguistic study of biblical Greek and to the exegesis of biblical texts.

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, Free University of Berlin (Anglistics), course: Seminar Verb classes and alternations, language: English, abstract: [...] “This work is guided by the assumption that the behaviour of verb, particularly with respect to the expression and interpretation of its arguments, is to a large extent determined by its meaning.” (Levin 1993) [Levin tries to develop a system which enables the speaker to determine the behaviour of a verb by its meaning] Levin points out that a native speaker is able to make subtle judgements about the syntactic behaviour of a verb. She hypothesises that it is the meaning of the verb which enables the speaker to make such judgements about a verb’s syntactic behaviour. //In particular, the ability of a verb to exist in certain syntactic frames or constructions (see examples below) is sensitive to certain components of meaning. The book aims to establish the relevant components of meaning, and thereby classify the English verbs into classes of shared behaviour and meaning. Levin (1993:.. following ... 1987) uses the verb “gally” - a nearly obsolete whaling term little-known to native speakers - to illustrate this relationship between a verb’s meaning and its syntactic behaviour. [...]