John Beavers

About

John Beavers is the Department Chair and the Robert D. King Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a faculty member within the College of Liberal Arts, specializing in syntax, semantics, and lexical semantics. His role involves leading academic and research initiatives within the department, contributing to the advancement of linguistic studies, and supporting students and faculty in the field of linguistics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Communication
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Manner and Result in the Roots of Verbal Meaning

  Linguistic Inquiry · 2012-07-01 · 308 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2010) argue that verbs fall into (at least) two classes: result verbs (e.g., break) and manner verbs (e.g., run). No verb encodes both manner and result simultaneously, a truth-conditional fact that Rappaport Hovav and Levin argue follows from how verb meanings are composed at the level of event structure. However, a key issue in verifying this claim is isolating truth-conditional diagnostics for manner and result. We develop and review a number of such diagnostics and…

  PublisherDOI

• Aspectual classes and scales of change

  Linguistics · 2013-01-28 · 83 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Standard models of aspectual classes focus on event decompositional or featural distinctions. However, such classifications often over- or under-generate, and do not necessarily capture the temporal properties aspectual classifications are based on. I develop a predictive model of aspectual classes based on theories of scalar change, taking two independently motivated properties of scales as key: (a) how specific the predicate is about the theme's final state on the scale and (b) the scale's mer…

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• Result Verbs, Scalar Change, and the Typology of Motion Verbs

  Language · 2017-12-01 · 79 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this article we consider the nature of ‘result verbs’, typically defined as verbs describing scalar changes, which have played a significant role in the literature on verb typologies, event structures, and theories of (im)possible word meanings. We argue that the entailment of scalar change and the entailment of a new result state should not be wholly conflated. Rather, various previously proposed diagnostics for scalar change actually pick out at least two distinct notions— entailing change…

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• The Roots of Verbal Meaning

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 74 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This book explores possible and impossible word meanings, with a specific focus on the meanings of verbs. It adopts the now common view that verb meanings consist at least partly of an event structure, made up of an event template describing the verb’s broad temporal and causal contours that occurs across lots of verbs and groups them into semantic and grammatical classes, plus an idiosyncratic root describing specific, real world states and actions that distinguish verbs with the same…

  PublisherDOI

• In defense of the reflexivization analysis of anticausativization

  Lingua · 2012-12-06 · 56 citations

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Recent grants

• The Meaning of Verbal Roots Across Languages

  NSF · $305k · 2015–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Andrew Koontz‐Garboden

  University of Manchester

  19 shared

• Cala Zubair

  3 shared

• Henri Kauhanen

  3 shared

• Kyle Jerro

  3 shared

• Elise LeBovidge

  Modern Language Association

  3 shared

• Michael Everdell

  The University of Texas at Austin

  3 shared

• Stephen G. Nichols

  3 shared

• Stephen Wechsler

  MGH Institute of Health Professions

  2 shared

Similar researchers at University of Texas at Austin

• Don Millerh-36
• Harvey M. Sussmanh-33
• David I. Beaverh-32