Quantitative Valency Addition within the Lexical-Constructional Model

The paper analyses some instances of the Caused-Motion Construction where intransitive verbs of perception are reinterpreted as transitive activity predicates, i.e. they undergo ‘subcategorial conversion’ that engenders “quantitative valency addition” as in He gazed me out of the club. It is shown that the caused-motion construction is a Constructional Template, i.e. an abstract semantic representation of syntactically relevant meaning elements, which coerces a Lexical Template, i.e. a low-level semantic representation of the syntactically relevant content of a predicate, through internal and external constraints; in the case of transitivization, such constraints involve Aktionsart changes.