Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

transitivity as opposed to the pattern in (2), which exhibits high transitivity (Zólyomi
1999: 216-217 n. 2).
In section 1.1, the OO hypothesis and its roots in work carried out, above all, by
Krecher, is briefly examined and the rather heterogeneous and complex character of the
“system” of verbal prefixes emphasized. In section 1.2, a proper subset of the many
lexemes that are generally described as compound verbs is isolated on the basis of a
simple diagnostic: the occurrence of a bare, unmodified nominal component of a
compound verb that immediately precedes the verbal component with the verbal prefix
[bi-√] (termed the Bare Noun + *Bi-√ Verb [BNBV] class) as in (1). The set of lexemes
defined by the BNBV diagnostic, particularly if it is further restricted to inalienable
nouns (hence the mnemonic [BNBV inal]), is interesting in that it corresponds to what are
known as low source applicative constructions in other languages (Pylkkänen 2002) and
their association with privative semantics (including verbs of perception which form the
core of the BNBV inal class). Low source applicatives and their semantic peculiarities are
described and compared to the contextual meaning of the subset of compound verbs
defined as BNBV inal in section 1.3. The three following sections look at three types of
BNBV inal verb in more detail: section 1.4 deals with verbs of perception, section 1.5 with
what, for the time being, I term verbs of adversity and section 1.6 with the remaining
examples.
In section 1.7, a number of possible motivations for and/or correlations with the
BNBV inal class are sketched out and two distinct phenomena are isolated as likely factors
in the semantic effects displayed by the BNBV inal class: indefiniteness and transfer of
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