Presentational capacity of English transitive verbs: On some semantic and FSP aspects of SEIZE

Abstract

Even though a number of verbs, owing to their syntactic-semantic characteristics, tend to operate primarily in Presentation or Quality Scales respectively, most verbs generally appear to be capable of acting within both the scales. In authentic communication, the sentence perspective is determined by various criteria: apart from the relative “weightiness” of the postverbal modification, it is especially the context-independence of the subject along with the presentational capacity of the verb that plays a crucial role. This paper sets out to explore the syntactic and semantic qualities of the transitive verb seize. Making use of two large corpora, the proposed case study tries to delimit under what conditions seize tends to operate in one of the two dynamic semantic scales. Model sentences are contrasted in terms of their presentational/qualitative features with special regard to the phenomenon of subject — verb semantic affinity.