Taking as its point of departure the general assumption that meaning is crucial in accounting
for verb complementation this volume presents the results of an empirical study of verb
complementation patterns of semantically similar English verbs. The semantic parallels of the
verbs selected are based on their coverage in dictionaries - first and foremost the Valency
Dictionary of English (Herbst Heath Roe and Götz 2004) - as well as corpus research and
native speaker assessments. It is demonstrated that despite obvious similarities in
complementation between such verbs there are still a significant number of syntactic
discrepancies which cannot be accounted for on the basis of meaning alone and that semantic
factors - such as selection restrictions and aspectual properties - do not sufficiently
correlate with the verbs' syntactic properties and consequently do not have sufficient
explanatory power. Thus the results rigorously challenge so-called projectionist approaches
which assume the position that complementation is determined by semantic properties and thus
ought to be predictable on this basis. In the light of a general trend towards placing greater
emphasis on semantic aspects in the fields of construction grammar and cognitive grammar too
the number of idiosyncratic phenomena on the level of single complements as well as whole
patterns clearly underlines the importance of storage phenomena as opposed to rule-based
generation. As such it stresses the necessity of finding ways to systematically account for
item-specific properties of verbs in any grammatical theory of the English language.The book is
targeted at all linguists interested in the relationship between semantics and syntax which is
one of the prevalent questions in modern linguistics also in the field of construction grammar
and cognitive grammar. Since the data is presented in a way which is compatible with various
theories of complementation the target group is clearly not restricted to any specific
linguistic school. Because of the large amount of item-specific information presented this
book is also a valuable source for grammarians and lexicographers.
