408 Verbal Hygiene

In some cases, these purposes are broadly political:

verbal hygiene is used to affirm a particular view of
the ideal social order. This motivation is evident
in conservative defences of standard languages, in
feminist arguments for nonsexist language and the
counterarguments of their opponents, in purist movements to purge languages of foreign elements, and in
attempts to preserve or revive minority languages as
symbols of ethnic or national identity. Professional
and commercial interests (e.g., the interest of publishers in maintaining certain norms of written style) may
also motivate verbal hygiene. And it can also be a
form of language play (Cook, 2000) this function
is probably its main one for Klingon enthusiasts, for
instance.

can study normative practices without necessarily

endorsing them. However, the book does challenge
claims that linguistics itself is value free (the axiom
all varieties are linguistically equal, for instance,
is not just a statement of what linguists believe to be
true, but implicitly also a value judgement). If we
accept that evaluation and verbal hygiene are integral
parts of language-using, sociolinguists must engage
in critical debates about the grounds for particular
evaluations rather than denying the legitimacy of
evaluation itself.

Debates on Verbal Hygiene

Bibliography

Some linguists (e.g., Kalogjera, 2000) have criticized verbal hygiene as a revisionist concept that
rehabilitates reactionary forms of prescriptivism,
undermines the objectivity of scholarship, and
encourages sociolinguists to politicize discussions of
language attitudes and linguistic change. In Verbal
hygiene (Cameron, 1995: xi) it is noted that linguists

Cameron D (1995). Verbal hygiene. London: Routledge.

Cook G (2000). Language play. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Kalogjera D (2000). A sketch for a chronicle of (anti-)
prescriptivism. In Tomic O M & Radovanovic M (eds.)
History and perspectives of language study. Philadelphia:
Benjamins.

See also: Description and Prescription; Language Attitudes; Language Ideology; Standardization.

Verbs
A Viberg, University of Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden

Lexicalization Patterns

2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Verbs are primarily used to talk about events, but the

way events are encoded may vary dramatically. In
Kalam, a language spoken in the highlands of Papua
New Guinea, many events that are encoded as simple
verbs in English are described as a sequence of events,
each encoded by a simple verb (Pawley, 1987):

Verbs vs. Nouns

Verbs and nouns are the two major word classes in
most, possibly all, languages (see Word Classes/Parts
of Speech: Overview). With respect to meaning, basic
concrete nouns tend to follow perceptually salient
natural partitions in human environment according
to the natural partitioning hypothesis (Gentner and
Boroditsky, 2001), whereas verbs to a greater extent
are language-specific and show greater variation with
respect to meaning across languages. This feature
explains why children universally tend to acquire
early nouns before early verbs.
The verb is the core of the clause and has a relational meaning, relating to one or more participants
(or arguments) to an event. In general, verbs are more
complex than nouns and tend to represent a greater
cognitive load on processing than nouns. Another
basic characteristic of prototypical verbs is that
they crucially involve change through time, whereas
concrete nouns tend to be stable across time.

(1) Kab anan ap

yap pk-e-k
pag-p ok.
stone glass come fall it-having- it-has- that
hit-DS
broken
A stone broke the glass.

Kalam is a good example of a verb serializing language (see Serial Verb Constructions). Serial verbs
exist marginally in English, in sequences such as Go
get the book. Serial verbs are, however, characteristic
of Southeast Asian, West African, Papuan, and Oceanic languages (Crowley, 2002). Verb serialization is
defined as a combination within the same simple
clause of lexical verbs that can function independently as verbs and that must be interpreted as having the
same values for tense-aspect-mood even if those
values are not necessarily overtly marked on all of
the verbs in the series. Auxiliaries (or helping verbs)

Verbs 409

also appear in sequences of two or more verbs such as

Mary should have come, but such sequences are introduced by an auxiliary in finite form followed by one
or more verbs in various nonfinite forms.
Kalam is also a good illustration that the number of
verbs can vary dramatically. In this language, around
15 simple verbs account for close to 90% of the
occurrences of verbs in running text, and the total
number of simple verbs is around 100. In English
and other European languages, there are something
in the range of 10 000 different verbs or more. The
frequency of occurrence, however, singles out a small
number of verbs as basic even in European languages.
The 20 most frequent verbs tend to cover close to
50% of the textual frequency of verbs in representative corpora. Among them are several verbs with
predominantly grammatical functions such as the
copula be, the verb have, and modal verbs. But in
addition, there are a number of lexical verbs referred
to as nuclear verbs in Viberg (1993) that tend to be
the most frequent verbs within the most basic lexical
semantic fields (or conceptual domains) such as motion (go/come), possession (give/take), production
(make), verbal communication (say) and perception
(see). The nuclear verbs tend to be basic even in nonEuropean languages. Even if verbs are more languagespecific than nouns, this characteristic is only a matter
of degree.
Nuclear verbs also tend to have a rich pattern of
polysemy. Newman (1996, 1998) demonstrates this
pattern for the verb give across a wide range of languages, showing a strong crosslinguistic tendency for
verbs with this meaning to extend into the grammatical areas of recipient/benefactive, permission/enablement, and causation. It has also been possible to show
that basic meanings within a field are lexicalized in a
certain order across languages. For perception, there
is a hierarchy: see > hear > feel/taste/smell. Verbs of
perception have a tendency to extend their meaning
to cover cognitive meanings such as understand and
know (Viberg, 1984, 2001; Evans and Wilkins, 2000).
From another perspective, a number of studies based
on Talmy (1985, 2000) have looked at conflation
patterns, the way meaning components are combined
(conflated) to form the meaning of verb roots, in
particular, how motion verbs across languages can
combine motion Path (enter, descend) or motion
Manner (run, swim). Originally, Talmy divided languages into two major types depending on what alternative was dominant, but more recent research has
come to regard this evidence as a continuum where
languages, for example, can be placed along a cline of
manner salience (Slobin, 2004).
The semantic organization of the more or less complete set of verbs in a language can be described in

WordNet format, based on semantic relations such as

hyponymy, antonymy, and synonymy. (See Fellbaum,
1998 for English, Vossen, 1999 for other European
languages. See also Relevant Websites at the end of
this article.) (see WordNet(s).)

From Semantic Representation to

Syntactic Argument Structure
As mentioned, verbs are relational, and an essential
part of the meaning of a verb is the type of relations it
holds to various arguments, the argument structure
(see Argument Structure), in particular subjects and
objects such as man and car in The man washed the
car. According to the approach to semantics known as
frame semantics (see Frame Semantics), verbs (and
other relational words) evoke frames schematic
structures of recurring situations. A verb such as
give, for example, evokes the transfer frame, which
can be described as follows: Someone (the Donor) is
in possession of something (the Theme) and then
causes someone else (the Recipient) to be in possession of the Theme. This frame is evoked by give in
sentences such as: The teacher (Donor) gave the student (Recipient) a book (Theme) or alternatively: The
teacher (Donor) gave the book (Theme) to the student
(Recipient). The syntactic realization of the frame
elements can be described with respect to Phrase
types (NP, PP, etc.) and grammatical functions (subject, object, complement, etc.) in Table 1.
See Fillmore et al. (2003) for a description of the
large FrameNet lexical database of English, containing verbs and other abstract words organized according to these principles. At the time of writing, there
are more than 200 frame elements, but many of them
are hierarchically related to more general frame elements. For example, Donor is a type of Agent.

Verbal Morphology
Morphological markers on the verb are primarily of
three types: Valency markers, Agreement/Reference
markers, and Tense-Mood-Aspect (TMA) markers.
The number of inflectional markers on the verb varies

Table 1 Schematic structure of a sample sentence, using the

verb give
The
teacher

Frame elements
Phrase types
Grammatical
functions

Donor
NP
Subject

gave

a book

to the student

Theme
NP
Object

Recipient
PP-to
Complement

410 Verbs

dramatically across languages from zero to several

hundred. However, the inflectional categories that
exist primarily belong to a restricted number of
major categories with a few central members. The
inflectional markers have a characteristic order
according to their decreasing relevance to the meaning of the verb (Bybee, 1985): Aspect occurs closest to
the stem, followed by tense, and then by mood, which
is followed by person.
Even if the arguments of verbs can appear in a wide
range of phrase types and grammatical functions,
there is a core consisting of subject and object and
(in some languages) indirect object that is central in
grammatical descriptions of clause structure. Valency
refers to the number of core arguments. Among derivational processes characteristic of verbs, valencychanging derivations hold a prominent position
(Dixon and Aikhenvald, 2000). Such derivations are
basically of two types as shown below:

gender or noun class. Usually agreement arises from

grammaticalization of anaphoric pronouns, but other
sources such as analogy exist. The most commonly
marked argument is the subject, but it is not uncommon for languages also to mark the object on
the verb. There are even languages that mark the
indirect object or (in a few languages) some oblique
function. Languages that completely lack verbal
agreement are also common. Referential tracking
can be achieved also with switch-reference markers
on a medial verb in a serial verb construction or a
verb in a subordinate clause indicating whether its
subject is identical with (same-subject: SS) or different
from another verb (different-subject: DS. See the example from Kalam above) (see Switch Reference).
The inflection of tense, mood, and aspect that is
also highly characteristic of the verb is treated in a
separate article (see Tense, Mood, Aspect: Overview).

. Decreasing: Passive, Antipassive, Reflexive, Reciprocal, Anticausative (and Middle, which is problematic)
. Increasing: Causative and Applicative

See also: Argument Structure; Frame Semantics; Serial

Verb Constructions; Switch Reference; Tense, Mood, Aspect: Overview; Word Classes/Parts of Speech: Overview;
WordNet(s).

The terms mentioned above should be reserved for

constructions containing some type of explicit formal
marking. Languages can also have a number of ambitransitive verbs that can be either transitive or intransitive without any derivational marking such as
English melt (John melted the lead vs. The lead
melted).
In many languages, certain semantic features of the
arguments of the verb are signaled by morphological
markers on the verb, a phenomenon known as verbal
agreement (Barlow and Ferguson, 1988). There is a
formal and a functional view on agreement. The markers can be regarded as redundant copies of information already present in the clause, a view that is most
natural when the argument must also be present as a
free word such as the English third person singular
s: He/She knows. In some languages, however, verbal
agreement markers in many clauses are the only explicit markers of the referents of the core arguments
of the verb and anaphoric pronouns in the form of
independent words are primarily used for various
types of emphasis. Because of this incidence, functionalists often refer to verbal agreement as reference
tracking, i.e., indexing on the verb of its arguments by
various morphological means, and it might be argued
that even redundant markers, such as in English, serve
as cues for the interpretation together with more
explicit cues. The semantic features that are marked
on the verb by verbal agreement are (a subset of) the
ones that are characteristic of anaphoric pronouns,
such as person, number, and (to a lesser degree)

Bibliography
Barlow M & Ferguson C A (eds.) (1988). Agreement in
natural language: approaches, theories, descriptions.
Stanford: CSLI.
Bybee J (1985). Morphology: a study of the relation between
meaning and form. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Crowley T (2002). Serial verbs in Oceanic: a descriptive
typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dixon R M W & Aikhenvald A (eds.) (2000). Changing
valency: case studies in transitivity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Evans N & Wilkins D (2000). In the minds ear: the semantic extension of perception verbs in Australian languages.
Language 76, 546592.
Fellbaum C (1998). A semantic network of English verbs.
In Fellbaum C (ed.) WordNet: an electronic lexical database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 69104.
Fillmore C, Johnson C R & Petruck M (2003). Background
to FrameNet. In Fontenelle Th (ed.) FrameNet and
Frame Semantics. Special issue of International Journal
of Lexicography, 16. 231366.
Gentner D & Boroditsky L (2001). Individuation, relativity, and early word learning. In Bowerman M &
Levinson S (eds.) Language acquisition and conceptual
development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
213256.
Newman J (1996). Give: a cognitive linguistic study. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Newman J (ed.) (1998). The linguistics of giving.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Pawley A (1987). Encoding events in Kalam and English:
different logics for reporting experience. In Tomlin R

Verificationism 411
(ed.) Coherence and grounding in discourse. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. 87129.
Slobin D I (2004). The many ways to search for a frog:
linguistic typology and the expression of motion events.
In Stro mqvist S & Verhoeven L (eds.) Relating events in
narrative 2: Typological and contextual perspectives.
Mahwah, NJ/London: Lawrence Erlbaum. 219257.
Talmy L (1985). Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In Shopen T (ed.) Language typology and syntactic description III: Grammatical
categories and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 57149.
Talmy L (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics (2 vols).
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Viberg A (1984). The verbs of perception: a typological
study. Linguistics 21, 123162.
(1993). Crosslinguistic perspectives on lexical
Viberg A
organization and lexical progression. In Hyltenstam K
& Viberg A (eds.) Progression and regression in language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 340385.

Viberg A (2001). The verbs of perception. In Haspelmath

M, Ko nig E & Oesterreicher W (eds.) Language typology
and language universals: an international handbook.
Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. 12941309.
Vossen P (ed.) (1999). EuroWordNet: a multlingual
database with lexical semantic networks for European
languages. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Relevant Websites
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu The English version of
WordNet.
http://www.globalwordnet.org/ Information about WordNets for other languages.
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet/ The FrameNet
database.

Verificationism
M Beaney, University of York, York, UK
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Verificationism is the view that the meaning of a
(synthetic or empirical) statement is given by its method of verification. A sentence, as used on a given
occasion to make a (synthetic or empirical) statement,
has meaning if and only if its truth or falsity can in
principle be determined by experience. Verificationism was the central doctrine of logical positivism
(also called logical empiricism), a movement that
originated in the work of the Vienna circle in the
early 1930s and received its classic statement in A. J.
Ayers Language, truth and logic (1936). Although
subject to devastating criticism in the 1940s and
1950s, the motivation behind verificationism has
continued to influence philosophers ever since, most
notably, in the work of W. V. O. Quine and Michael
Dummett. Indeed, the basic positivist impulse to
reject anything that is not grounded in sensory experience goes back at least to David Hume, and has
been a significant feature of the philosophical landscape throughout the modern era. Humes famous
words at the very end of his Enquiry concerning
human understanding are often taken as the definitive
statement of the underlying positivist view:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school
metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any

abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No.

Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning
matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the
flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and
illusion.

The repudiation of metaphysics was characteristic of

logical positivism, too, and this was rooted in the
doctrine of verificationism.

The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

Central to logical positivism was the distinction
between analytic and synthetic statements
corresponding to Humes distinction (implicit in the
passage just quoted) between relations of ideas and
matters of fact. According to the logical positivists, a
statement is analytic if and only if its truth or falsity is
determined solely by the meaning of its constituent
terms. All bachelors are unmarried men, for example, was seen as true in virtue of the meaning of the
term bachelor. Analytic truths were regarded as both
necessary and a priori. Their necessity was seen to lie
in their tautological nature, a view that the logical
positivists took from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since, on
their account, analytic truths could be judged to be
true merely by knowing their meaning without
needing to consult the world in any way they were
also regarded as a priori truths.
A statement was seen as synthetic, on the other
hand, if it is not analytic, and synthetic truths were