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Dispositions and the verbal description of their manifestations: a case study on Emission Verbs

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Abstract

The present paper argues that when thematic roles are restricted to judgments about causal properties of events, it falls short of accounting for cases where thematic roles reflect judgments about dispositional properties of objects. I develop my argument with a case study on a class of verbs that have been called ‘Emission Verbs’ and which are difficult to bring in line with the unaccusativity hypothesis put forward by Perlmutter. Reviewing two diametrically opposed accounts of Emission Verbs in the literature, I show that the thematic-semantic relation between the events described by Emission Verbs and their single arguments cannot be characterized unambiguously in terms of causal properties of events but pertains to dispositional properties residing in the emitter argument. The paper develops a lexical-semantic analysis of Emission Verbs according to which the event described by an Emission Verb is the manifestation of the dispositional property of the emitter argument when appropriate external circumstances obtain. The paper concludes by outlining how the proposed dispositional analysis of Emission Verbs may inform the analysis of the causative alternation.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the handling editor Veneeta Dayal and two anonymous reviewers for having carefully read earlier versions of the paper. The paper profited very much from their instructive and detailed comments. I am also indebted to the reviewers and participants of NELS 45 and Semantics and Philosophy in Europe 7 as well as the participants of the 2015 workshop on the building blocks of word meaning at the University of Stuttgart for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. I would particularly like to thank Antje Rodeutscher, Florian Schäfer and Hans Kamp for reading and commenting on numerous earlier versions of the paper. All remaining errors are my own. The research reported in this paper was supported by DFG grants PR-1860/1-1 and SFB-732/B4.

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    Tillmann Pross

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Pross, T. Dispositions and the verbal description of their manifestations: a case study on Emission Verbs. Linguist and Philos 43, 149–191 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09268-5

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