Enriched compositionality of the argument structure of Croatian and Slovenian verbs

Tušek, Jelena. (2019). Enriched compositionality of the argument structure of Croatian and Slovenian verbs. PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Linguistics.
(PDS Lingvistike) [mentor Peti-Stantić, Anita and Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan].

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Abstract

The aim of this dissertation was to analyze the category of aspectual verbs in Croatian and Slovene with regards to their semantic contribution to aspectual constructions. Following Jackendoff's enriched compositionality (1997) the thesis explores the modelling of the meaning of the non-canonical argument structure of the aspectual verbs (e.g. početi, nastaviti, završiti) with nouns denoting entities in Croatian and Slovenian. Issues raised by this phenomena are discussed, particularly with respect to different generative and cognitive approaches. The fundamental idea of the thesis is that the meaning of the aspectual construction with non-canonical argument structure should be modelled from the usage-based perspective. The study of aspectual verbs in Croatian and Slovenian was carried out on the basis of their description in Croatian and Slovenian grammars and dictionaries. Since usage-based methodology lies on the use of corpora for the linguistic analysis, we have conducted the comparative corpus analysis of the aspectual verbs and their complementation using Croatian and Slovenian web corpora hrWaC and slWaC. Sentences with aspectual verbs in the non-canonical argument structure with four nouns (kuća, kuhinja, knjiga and ručak for Croatian; hiša, kuhinja, knjiga and kosilo for Slovenian) in accusative and instrumental case have been annotated to analyze the range of implicit meanings of constructions. The goal of this analysis was to test the adequacy of the General lexicon theory (Pustejovsky 1995) for modelling the meaning of enriched compositionality. This analysis has shown that the theory is not capable of determining all the implicit meanings of constructions and that it should be replaced by other models that are able to capture wider range of implicit meaning. In order to experimentally approach this phenomena, two sets of experiments have been carried out. First, acceptability judgement that tested the acceptability of constructions with non-canonical argument structure. The results have shown that constructions with aspectual verbs (završiti and končati; "finish") and complements that denote entities were more acceptable than constructions with other aspectual verbs. Constructions with Croatian and Slovenian verb nastaviti/nadaljevati (engl. to continue) were rated as the least acceptable in the research. This results are compatible with the results of the corpora analysis according to which constructions with this verb are the least present in both languages. In the second experiment, participants had to list implicit meanings of the aspectual constructions with missing verbs. This experiment has shown that the meaning of aspectual constructions with non-canonical argument are severely influenced by the meaning of the sentence subject (male, female), meaning of the object and the meaning of the construction itself. The experiment has shown that meanings of constructions with instrumental complements even are harder to model using the Pustejovsky's framework. Based on the relevant theoretical literature and results obtained by the corpus analysis and two experiments, dissertation proposes the use of a construction-based approach combined with the generalized event knowledge model for the interpretation of enriched compositionality of the constructions with aspectual verbs and non-canonical arguments.

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