Do Verbs in Motion Stay in Motion? The stability of verb meanings across sentential context

Abstract

One verb can be used to convey a variety of actions, and using a verb in a specific syntactic structure provides information about the verb’s sense that gives the sentence overall meaning. This research sought to determine how changing the sense of a verb, by using it in a caused-motion construction, would affect people’s perception of the verb’s meaning in isolation. The experiment consisted of similarity judgments between a pair of verbs and comparing those ratings to a similarity judgment of the same verb pair with one verb used in a cause-motion sentence. The results indicated that verb meaning remains stable even when the verb’s context shifts.