Stative dimensional verbs in German

Abstract

Stative verbs such as German wiegen ‘weigh’ and heißen ‘be called’ encode an attribute of the subject referent such as WEIGHT or NAME and, in addition, allow for the specification of a value for this attribute. From a cognitive perspective, we refer to attributes of this type as object dimensions and to stative verbs encoding object dimensions as stative dimensional verbs. We argue in favor of the relevance of these verbs to cognitive science and semantics. After introducing basic types of stative dimensional verbs, we discuss the results of an in-depth investigation of these verbs in German. In addition to the kind of dimensions encoded by stative verbs, there will be a particular focus on contrasts in the distribution of dimension encoding verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Moreover, we will present a taxonomy of stative dimensional verbs in dependence of the specific dimension.