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3.4. LEXICAL REPRESENTATIONS FOR VERBS
An important feature of the layered structure of the clause is the differential treatment
given to operators like tense, aspect and illocutionary force, and the same contrast is a
vital part of the layered structure of the noun phrase. NP operators include determin-
ers (articles, demonstratives, deictics), quantifiers, negation and adjectival and nominal
modifiers (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997).
3.3.1 NP headed
Pronouns can be classified into a number of subtypes: personal pronouns, including pos-
sessive pronouns (PRO), e.g. I liked her book; relative pronouns (PRO REL), e.g. the
book which I bought; demonstrative pronouns (PRO DEM), e.g. That pleased Mary; WH-
pronouns (PRO wh ), e.g. who did Fred see?; and expletive pronouns (PRO EXP ), e.g. it
rained.
3.4 Lexical representations for verbs
These distinctions among the four basic Aktionsart types may be represented formally
as in Table 3.2. The term Aktionsart refers to the means of a capturing the distinctions
between basic states of affairs, or events, of individual verbs. These representations
are called logical structures. Following the conventions of formal semantics, constants
(which are normally predicates) are presented in boldface followed by a prime, whereas
variable elements are presented in normal typeface. The elements in boldface and prime
are part of the vocabulary of the semantic metalanguage used in the decomposition; they
are not words from any particular human language.
Table 3.2: Lexical representations for the basic Aktionsart classes
Verb class Logical structure
State predicate’ (x) or (x, y)
Activity do’ (x, [predicate’(x) or (x, y)])
Achievement INGR predicate’ (x) or (x, y)
Accomplishment BECOME predicate’ (x) or (x, y)
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