We’re going through changes: How change of state verbs and arguments combine in scale composition

Abstract

The role of scalarity has attracted increasing attention in recent analyses of verb-related phenomena such as aspectuality (telicity and durativity) and argument realization. A central issue in this regard is which types of verbs express a scalar change and which do not. There is some agreement that incremental theme verbs do not come with a scale but instead depend on an incremental theme argument which introduces the scale. By contrast, it is assumed that change of state verbs already lexicalize a scale as part of their meaning and may therefore be considered as scalar verbs. In this paper, we tackle the question whether all change of state verbs are scalar in the sense that they fully lexicalize a scale. We argue that a change of state verb can be scalar, even if not all of the scale parameters are lexically specified, and propose a typology of scalar underspecification. We discuss two types of strategies that are applied for the resolution of scalar underspecification: (i) introduction of a missing parameter by the context and (ii) composition with a scale-denoting argument. We focus on the compositional aspects of scale structure and illustrate the interaction between verbs and arguments in building scalar changes.