The elasticity of verb meaning revisited

Abstract

This paper investigates the source of systematic argument realization differences among two classes of manner verbs, hitting and wiping verbs. Its starting point is the hypothesis that argument realization patterns can largely be attributed to grammatical constraints on argument expression interacting with grammatically privileged properties of a verb's root.  These properties include the root's ontological category and, as argued here, whether it encodes contact at a point or a region.