OLD ENGLISH VERBS-OF-RUNNING: LINKING SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION AND MORPHOSYNTACTIC STRUCTURE

Abstract

This Statement encapsulates the basic requirement for lexical representations: they must be not only the way to encode the semantic intricacies of the meaning of words but they must become also the 'ignition key' for several morphosyntactic phenomena, to the extent that they are central to the grammatical apparatus of several theories, such äs Dik's (1997) Functional Grammar or Van Valin and LaPolla's (1997) Role and Reference Grammar (henceforth RRG). Despite the relevance of this topic in contemporary research, and the abundance of studies on several areas of Present-Day English vocabulary, little has been said about the interaction of meaning and syntax in Old English (OE, henceforth), and even less if the aim is to motivate the syntactic and morphological behaviour of OE verbs from their semantic structure. This paper aims at providing a System of lexical representation for a group of OE verbs verbs of running that not only encodes the basic semantic scenario denoted by these verbs, but also triggers a set of linking mechanisms with their possible morphosyntactic alternations. The structure of the paper is äs follows: the first section explains the procedures for selecting the corpus of OE verbs that belong to the subdomain of 'verbs-of-running' within the general domain of motion verbs; it deals also with some studies which have also coped with the semantic and syntactic features of verbs of movement; although none of them focuses specifically on OE, their contributions will become helpful for a semantic pre-characterization of the verbs of our study. Section 2 is devoted to the construction of the lexical template that