earticle

영어

This paper aims to clarify the semantic differences between four prototypical transitive verbs, break, cut, hit, and touch. Since Fillmore‘s (1970) simple classification of change-of-state verbs and surface-contact verbs, various attempts have been made to identify the semantics of these verbs. Levin (1993) classifies English verbs depending on various diathesis alternations, arguing that semantic components of a verb determine the syntactic argument structures. Langacker (1991) and Talmy (1996), from the cognitive position, have different insights into the verbs. They explain prototypical transitive constructions and the syntactic variations, based on cognitive principles such as prominence and windowing of attention. Their construal-based explanation seems to go beyond the description of the semantic determinants shaping the syntactic behavior of a verb. In this paper, there are some modifications and elaborations both on Levin's and Langacker-Talmy's ideas: semantic determinants and syntactic prominence (or profiling) are redefined as semantic focus and syntactic focus, respectively, on the action-chain schema, and various syntactic alternations are consistently explained.