LEXICAL MEANING OR CONSTRUCTIONAL INFERENCE? VERB SEMANTICS IN SPOKEN ENGLISH DIALOGUE
Teodora Popescu 
1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania
Abstract
This study re-examines the contribution of lexical verb meaning to event interpretation in spoken English. It argues that, in interactionally rich discourse, verb roots are frequently underspecified and that event meaning is largely reconstructed through constructional patterns and pragmatic inference. Drawing on a corpus of scripted spoken dialogue from contemporary television series, the analysis focuses on high-frequency English verbs (e.g. get, make, take, go, do) across a range of conversational and institutional contexts. Using a corpus-based, usage-oriented methodology informed by cognitive linguistics, the study compares the predictive power of lexical verbs and constructions for core event-semantic parameters, including telicity, agentivity, and affectedness. The results indicate that constructional configurations and local discourse context consistently provide stronger cues to event interpretation than lexical verb identity alone, with individual verbs exhibiting substantial semantic variability even within identical argument-structure frames. These findings challenge verb-centred models of lexical semantics and aspectual classification and suggest instead that spoken discourse favours semantically light verb schemas whose meanings are dynamically enriched in context. The study contributes to debates on the lexicon–pragmatics interface by demonstrating that, in spoken interaction, event meaning emerges from the interaction of lexical resources, entrenched constructions, and discourse-level inference rather than from verb meaning in isolation.
Keywords: Verb semantics; Construction Grammar; Spoken discourse; Pragmatic inference; Event structure; Corpus linguistics.
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How to cite this paper: Popescu, T. (2023). Lexical meaning or constructional inference? Verb semantics in spoken English dialogue. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 16(2), 105–132. https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2023.16.2.7
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