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Article published In: Languages in Contrast
Vol. 26:1 (2026) ► pp.85–108

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The anatomy of a verb

Tear, rasgar, and lexical equivalence

ORCiD logo with link | Universitetet Oslo, Norway
ORCiD logo with link | Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Published online: 15 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00059.spa
Abstract
Figurative polysemy, in which a word’s original meaning is extended into domains for which it did not originally apply, is a pervasive property of human language. Previous research using cross-linguistic (English/Spanish) data has shown that an important set of similarities and differences in patterns of figurative verb polysemy between counterpart verbs in two languages can be explained by detailed analysis of the event structures of each verb (McNally, L. and Spalek, A. A. 2022. Grammatically Relevant Aspects of Meaning and Verbal Polysemy. Linguistics 60(6): 1943–1987. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Here we treat a complementary case involving counterpart verbs in two languages which share the same basic event structures but differ in details of conceptual (or ‘root’) content, most importantly in the semantic restrictions on their participants. We show how, in this sort of case, the verbs will describe the same types of situations and be amenable to similar figurative extensions as long as their respective semantic restrictions can be met, but not otherwise. Teasing apart contrasts due to variation in event structural vs. conceptual content can shed light both on debates about the relation between root and grammatical content, as well as on the challenges of establishing lexical equivalences for verbs, be it for purposes of translation or for cross-linguistic comparison and the creation of lexical resources.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Case study: tear and rasgar
    • 3.1Similarity in event structures
    • 3.2Differences in conceptual content
    • 3.3Figurative similarities and differences
  • 4.Implications
    • 4.1The role of roots in event descriptions
    • 4.2Verb meaning and the notion of cross-linguistic counterpart
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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