Just a Matter of Manner? Modeling Action Verb Semantics in an Inter-Linguistic Perspective

Action verbs are an important testing ground for the study of lexical encoding of the manner feature. In this respect, the opposition between manner and result verbs has definitely become one of the central nodes to describe different ways to lexicalize the meaning components. Nonetheless, a more integrated way to conceive cognitive and semantic conceptualization of actions can lead to highlighting a wider range of lexicalization strategies. The inter-linguistic comparison of these strategies can make a major contribution to this end. In this paper, we will mostly focus on Chinese, English and Italian, and we will analyze the meaning components of different series of verbs from the semantic fields of breaking, cutting, cooking, killing, and motion. In order to perform such an analysis, we assumed the framework adopted by the imagact Ontology, a multilingual database linking visually represented action concepts and lexical entries. The results lead to reconsidering the weight of some of the traditional categories used to describe action verb semantics. More specifically, we will see that manner and result features can interact in different and complex ways, and that other components, such as the goal of the action, can be useful to describe the meaning of verbs encoding neither manner nor result