ABSTRACT

Verbs and other predicates determine what meaning a sentence expresses and, to a large extent, they determine what roles the accompanying arguments have, and even what kinds of noun phrases occur as arguments. In this chapter we explore predicates that have a valency of more than two. Many such predicates express transition, movement from one place to another, respectively the Source and the Goal. Some predicates express transfer, causing the movement of an entity from one place or person to another place or person. Movement through space requires some amount of time, so that a semantic account of some predicates has to include a time frame. We will see that some predicates are specialized in meaning and others are quite general. For example walk, drift and fly indicate particular ways of moving while go is general. The former are called more marked, the latter less marked.