In some cases, these purposes are broadly political:verbal hygiene is used to affirm a particular view ofthe ideal social order. This motivation is evidentin conservative defences of standard languages, infeminist arguments for nonsexist language and thecounterarguments of their opponents, in purist move-ments to purge languages of ‘foreign’ elements, and inattempts to preserve or revive minority languages assymbols of ethnic or national identity. Professionaland commercial interests (e.g., the interest of publish-ers in maintaining certain norms of written style) mayalso motivate verbal hygiene. And it can also be aform of ‘language play’ (Cook, 2000) – this functionis probably its main one for Klingon enthusiasts, forinstance.

Debates on Verbal Hygiene

Some linguists (e.g., Kalogjera, 2000) have criti-cized verbal hygiene as a ‘revisionist’ concept thatrehabilitates reactionary forms of prescriptivism,undermines the objectivity of scholarship, andencourages sociolinguists to politicize discussions oflanguage attitudes and linguistic change. In Verbalhygiene (Cameron, 1995: xi) it is noted that linguists

can study normative practices without necessarilyendorsing them. However, the book does challengeclaims 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 betrue, but implicitly also a value judgement). If weaccept that evaluation and verbal hygiene are integralparts of language-using, sociolinguists must engagein critical debates about the grounds for particularevaluations rather than denying the legitimacy ofevaluation itself.

See also: Description and Prescription; Language Atti-

tudes; Language Ideology; Standardization.

Bibliography

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.

408 Verbal Hygiene

Verbs

A Viberg, University of Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Verbs vs. Nouns

Verbs and nouns are the two major word classes inmost, possibly all, languages (see Word Classes/Partsof Speech: Overview). With respect to meaning, basicconcrete nouns tend to follow perceptually salientnatural partitions in human environment accordingto the natural partitioning hypothesis (Gentner andBoroditsky, 2001), whereas verbs to a greater extentare language-specific and show greater variation withrespect to meaning across languages. This featureexplains why children universally tend to acquireearly nouns before early verbs.

The verb is the core of the clause and has a rela-tional meaning, relating to one or more participants(or arguments) to an event. In general, verbs are morecomplex than nouns and tend to represent a greatercognitive load on processing than nouns. Anotherbasic characteristic of prototypical verbs is thatthey crucially involve change through time, whereasconcrete nouns tend to be stable across time.

Lexicalization Patterns

Verbs are primarily used to talk about events, but theway events are encoded may vary dramatically. InKalam, a language spoken in the highlands of PapuaNew Guinea, many events that are encoded as simpleverbs in English are described as a sequence of events,each encoded by a simple verb (Pawley, 1987):

(1)

Kab anan ap yap pk-e-k pag-p ok. stone glass come fall it-having-

hit-DS

it-has-broken

that

A stone broke the glass.

Kalam is a good example of a verb serializing lan-guage (see Serial Verb Constructions). Serial verbsexist marginally in English, in sequences such as Goget the book. Serial verbs are, however, characteristicof Southeast Asian, West African, Papuan, and Oce-anic languages (Crowley, 2002). Verb serialization isdefined as a combination within the same simpleclause of lexical verbs that can function independent-ly as verbs and that must be interpreted as having thesame values for tense-aspect-mood even if thosevalues are not necessarily overtly marked on all ofthe verbs in the series. Auxiliaries (or helping verbs)

Table 1 Schematic structure of a sample sentence, using the

verb ‘give’

The

teacher

gave a book to the student

Frame elements Donor Theme Recipient

Phrase types NP NP PP-to

Grammatical

functions

Subject Object Complement

Verbs 409

also appear in sequences of two or more verbs such asMary should have come, but such sequences are intro-duced by an auxiliary in finite form followed by oneor more verbs in various nonfinite forms.

Kalam is also a good illustration that the number ofverbs can vary dramatically. In this language, around15 simple verbs account for close to 90% of theoccurrences of verbs in running text, and the totalnumber of simple verbs is around 100. In Englishand other European languages, there are somethingin the range of 10 000 different verbs or more. Thefrequency of occurrence, however, singles out a smallnumber of verbs as basic even in European languages.The 20 most frequent verbs tend to cover close to50% of the textual frequency of verbs in representa-tive corpora. Among them are several verbs withpredominantly grammatical functions such as thecopula be, the verb have, and modal verbs. But inaddition, there are a number of lexical verbs referredto as nuclear verbs in Viberg (1993) that tend to bethe most frequent verbs within the most basic lexicalsemantic fields (or conceptual domains) such as mo-tion (go/come), possession (give/take), production(make), verbal communication (say) and perception(see). The nuclear verbs tend to be basic even in non-European languages. Even if verbs are more language-specific than nouns, this characteristic is only a matterof degree.

Nuclear verbs also tend to have a rich pattern ofpolysemy. Newman (1996, 1998) demonstrates thispattern for the verb give across a wide range of lan-guages, showing a strong crosslinguistic tendency forverbs with this meaning to extend into the grammati-cal areas of recipient/benefactive, permission/enable-ment, and causation. It has also been possible to showthat basic meanings within a field are lexicalized in acertain order across languages. For perception, thereis a hierarchy: see> hear> feel/taste/smell. Verbs ofperception have a tendency to extend their meaningto cover cognitive meanings such as understand andknow (Viberg, 1984, 2001; Evans and Wilkins, 2000).From another perspective, a number of studies basedon Talmy (1985, 2000) have looked at conflationpatterns, the way meaning components are combined(‘conflated’) to form the meaning of verb roots, inparticular, how motion verbs across languages cancombine motionþ Path (enter, descend) or motionþManner (run, swim). Originally, Talmy divided lan-guages into two major types depending on what al-ternative was dominant, but more recent research hascome to regard this evidence as a continuum wherelanguages, for example, can be placed along a cline ofmanner salience (Slobin, 2004).

The semantic organization of the more or less com-plete set of verbs in a language can be described in

WordNet format, based on semantic relations such ashyponymy, antonymy, and synonymy. (See Fellbaum,1998 for English, Vossen, 1999 for other Europeanlanguages. See also Relevant Websites at the end ofthis article.) (see WordNet(s).)

From Semantic Representation toSyntactic Argument Structure

As mentioned, verbs are relational, and an essentialpart of the meaning of a verb is the type of relations itholds to various arguments, the argument structure(see Argument Structure), in particular subjects andobjects such as man and car in The man washed thecar. According to the approach to semantics known asframe semantics (see Frame Semantics), verbs (andother relational words) evoke frames – schematicstructures of recurring situations. A verb such asgive, for example, evokes the transfer frame, whichcan be described as follows: Someone (the Donor) isin possession of something (the Theme) and thencauses someone else (the Recipient) to be in posses-sion of the Theme. This frame is evoked by give insentences such as: The teacher (Donor) gave the stu-dent (Recipient) a book (Theme) or alternatively: Theteacher (Donor) gave the book (Theme) to the student(Recipient). The syntactic realization of the frameelements can be described with respect to Phrasetypes (NP, PP, etc.) and grammatical functions (sub-ject, object, complement, etc.) in Table 1.

See Fillmore et al. (2003) for a description of thelarge FrameNet lexical database of English, contain-ing verbs and other abstract words organized accord-ing to these principles. At the time of writing, thereare more than 200 frame elements, but many of themare hierarchically related to more general frame ele-ments. For example, Donor is a type of Agent.

Verbal Morphology

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

410 Verbs

dramatically across languages from zero to severalhundred. However, the inflectional categories thatexist primarily belong to a restricted number ofmajor categories with a few central members. Theinflectional markers have a characteristic orderaccording to their decreasing relevance to the mean-ing of the verb (Bybee, 1985): Aspect occurs closest tothe stem, followed by tense, and then by mood, whichis followed by person.

Even if the arguments of verbs can appear in a widerange of phrase types and grammatical functions,there is a core consisting of subject and object and(in some languages) indirect object that is central ingrammatical descriptions of clause structure. Valencyrefers to the number of core arguments. Among deri-vational processes characteristic of verbs, valency-changing derivations hold a prominent position(Dixon and Aikhenvald, 2000). Such derivations arebasically of two types as shown below:

. Decreasing: Passive, Antipassive, Reflexive, Recip-rocal, Anticausative (and Middle, which is prob-lematic)

. Increasing: Causative and Applicative

The terms mentioned above should be reserved forconstructions containing some type of explicit formalmarking. Languages can also have a number of ambi-transitive verbs that can be either transitive or intrans-itive without any derivational marking such asEnglish melt (John melted the lead vs. The leadmelted).

In many languages, certain semantic features of thearguments of the verb are signaled by morphologicalmarkers on the verb, a phenomenon known as verbalagreement (Barlow and Ferguson, 1988). There is aformal and a functional view on agreement. The mar-kers can be regarded as redundant copies of informa-tion already present in the clause, a view that is mostnatural when the argument must also be present as afree word such as the English ‘third person singular –s’: He/She knows. In some languages, however, verbalagreement markers in many clauses are the only ex-plicit markers of the referents of the core argumentsof the verb and anaphoric pronouns in the form ofindependent words are primarily used for varioustypes of emphasis. Because of this incidence, func-tionalists often refer to verbal agreement as referencetracking, i.e., indexing on the verb of its arguments byvarious morphological means, and it might be arguedthat even redundant markers, such as in English, serveas cues for the interpretation together with moreexplicit cues. The semantic features that are markedon the verb by verbal agreement are (a subset of) theones that are characteristic of anaphoric pronouns,such as person, number, and (to a lesser degree)

gender or noun class. Usually agreement arises fromgrammaticalization of anaphoric pronouns, but othersources such as analogy exist. The most commonlymarked argument is the subject, but it is not un-common for languages also to mark the object onthe verb. There are even languages that mark theindirect object or (in a few languages) some obliquefunction. Languages that completely lack verbalagreement are also common. Referential trackingcan be achieved also with switch-reference markerson a medial verb in a serial verb construction or averb in a subordinate clause indicating whether itssubject is identical with (same-subject: SS) or differentfrom another verb (different-subject: DS. See the ex-ample from Kalam above) (see Switch Reference).

The inflection of tense, mood, and aspect that isalso highly characteristic of the verb is treated in aseparate article (see Tense, Mood, Aspect: Overview).

See also: Argument Structure; Frame Semantics; Serial

Verb Constructions; Switch Reference; Tense, Mood, As-

pect: Overview; Word Classes/Parts of Speech: Overview;

WordNet(s).

Bibliography

Barlow M & Ferguson C A (eds.) (1988). Agreement innatural language: approaches, theories, descriptions.Stanford: CSLI.

Bybee J (1985). Morphology: a study of the relation betweenmeaning and form. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Crowley T (2002). Serial verbs in Oceanic: a descriptivetypology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dixon R M W & Aikhenvald A (eds.) (2000). Changingvalency: case studies in transitivity. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Evans N & Wilkins D (2000). ‘In the mind’s ear: the seman-tic extension of perception verbs in Australian languages.’Language 76, 546–592.

Fellbaum C (1998). ‘A semantic network of English verbs.’In Fellbaum C (ed.) WordNet: an electronic lexical data-base. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 69–104.

Fillmore C, Johnson C R & Petruck M (2003). ‘Backgroundto FrameNet.’ In Fontenelle Th (ed.) FrameNet andFrame Semantics. Special issue of International Journalof Lexicography, 16. 231–366.

Gentner D & Boroditsky L (2001). ‘Individuation, relativ-ity, and early word learning.’ In Bowerman M &Levinson S (eds.) Language acquisition and conceptualdevelopment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.213–256.

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. 87–129.

Slobin D I (2004). ‘The many ways to search for a frog:linguistic typology and the expression of motion events.’In Stromqvist S & Verhoeven L (eds.) Relating events innarrative 2: Typological and contextual perspectives.Mahwah, NJ/London: Lawrence Erlbaum. 219–257.

Talmy L (1985). ‘Lexicalization patterns: semantic struc-ture in lexical forms.’ In Shopen T (ed.) Language typol-ogy and syntactic description III: Grammaticalcategories and the lexicon. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. 57–149.

Talmy L (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics (2 vols).Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Viberg A (1984). ‘The verbs of perception: a typologicalstudy.’ Linguistics 21, 123–162.

Viberg A (1993). ‘Crosslinguistic perspectives on lexicalorganization and lexical progression.’ In Hyltenstam K& Viberg A (eds.) Progression and regression in language.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 340–385.

VerificationismM 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 meth-od of verification. A sentence, as used on a givenoccasion to make a (synthetic or empirical) statement,has meaning if and only if its truth or falsity can – inprinciple – be determined by experience. Verification-ism was the central doctrine of logical positivism(also called ‘logical empiricism’), a movement thatoriginated in the work of the Vienna circle in theearly 1930s and received its classic statement in A. J.Ayer’s Language, truth and logic (1936). Althoughsubject to devastating criticism in the 1940s and1950s, the motivation behind verificationism hascontinued to influence philosophers ever since, mostnotably, in the work of W. V. O. Quine and MichaelDummett. Indeed, the basic positivist impulse – toreject anything that is not grounded in sensory expe-rience – goes back at least to David Hume, and hasbeen a significant feature of the philosophical land-scape throughout the modern era. Hume’s famouswords at the very end of his Enquiry concerninghuman understanding are often taken as the definitivestatement of the underlying positivist view:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or schoolmetaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any

Viberg A (2001). ‘The verbs of perception.’ In HaspelmathM, Konig E & Oesterreicher W (eds.) Language typologyand language universals: an international handbook.Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. 1294–1309.

Vossen P (ed.) (1999). EuroWordNet: a multlingualdatabase with lexical semantic networks for Europeanlanguages. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Relevant Websites

http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu – The English version ofWordNet.

http://www.globalwordnet.org/ – Information about Word-Nets for other languages.

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet/ – The FrameNetdatabase.

abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No.Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerningmatter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to theflames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry andillusion.

The repudiation of metaphysics was characteristic oflogical positivism, too, and this was rooted in thedoctrine of verificationism.

The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

Central to logical positivism was the distinctionbetween analytic and synthetic statements –corresponding to Hume’s distinction (implicit in thepassage just quoted) between relations of ideas andmatters of fact. According to the logical positivists, astatement is analytic if and only if its truth or falsity isdetermined solely by the meaning of its constituentterms. ‘All bachelors are unmarried men,’ for exam-ple, was seen as true in virtue of the meaning of theterm ‘bachelor.’ Analytic truths were regarded as bothnecessary and a priori. Their necessity was seen to liein their tautological nature, a view that the logicalpositivists took from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since, ontheir account, analytic truths could be judged to betrue merely by knowing their meaning – withoutneeding to consult the world in any way – they werealso regarded as a priori truths.

A statement was seen as synthetic, on the otherhand, if it is not analytic, and synthetic truths were