Trill, purr, and wail: Manner of Speaking Verbs in English

This paper focuses on the conceptual domain of manner of speaking (henceforth MoS) verbs in English. This domain has received scant attention in any language, whereas extensive attention has been devoted to research in the domain of manner of motion verbs, especially in the tradition of Talmy and Slobin. Indeed, over the last fifty years, only a limited number of scholars has attempted to explain conceptualization of MoS verbs (Cf. Zwicky 1971, Mufwene 1978, Snell-Hornby 1983, Levin 1993). These verbs represent, however, an area of research that is worth pursuing, in that previous contributions have disregarded the semantic-pragmatic properties encoded in their roots, and have defined them only on the basis of physical- auditory properties. We propose a fine grained description of how English MoS verbs are construed. We collected 186 MoS verb entries combining the lists found in previous research and all the synonyms found in Dictionary.com, Wordreference.com, and Merriam-Webster.com. The corpus was expanded through additional consultation of native speakers, and analyzed with the aim of verifying the presence of the semantic information MoS verbs encode not only in terms of physical-auditory, but also of semantic-pragmatic properties conflated in the verb root. Our findings suggest that the combination of these two types of properties, or lack thereof, accounts for the different aspects that characterize these verbs and permits identification of first tier and second tier (Slobin 1997) verbs within this domain. More specifically, the findings show that it is both the number, and also the type of components that combine in each verb conflation pattern that go together to define first and second tier verbs. Our analysis, furthermore, proves to be useful in distinguishing different nuances of meaning and distinct representation in groups of apparent synonym verbs. What emerges is an articulated gradient Idealized Cognitive Model of English MoS verbs. CRAL-13| 184 Logroño, La Rioja University of La Rioja July 18-20, 2013 REFERENCES Levin, B. (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mufwene, S. S. (1978). English Manner-of Speaking Verbs Revisited. In Farkas, D., Jacobsen, W. M., & Todrys K. W. (Eds.), Parasession on the Lexicon (pp. 278-288). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Slobin, D. (1997). Mind, code, and text. In Bybee, J., Haiman, J. & Thompson, S. A. (Eds.), Essays on language function and language type: dedicated to T. Givón (pp. 437-467). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Snell-Hornby, M. (1983). Verb-descriptivity in German and English: a contrastive study in semantic fields. Heidelberg: C. Winter Universitatsverlag. Zwicky, A. M. (1971). In a manner of speaking. Linguistic Inquiry 2. 223-233.