抄録
Since Dowty (1979) revived the decompositional theory of verb meanings as developed in generative semantics, the question of the possible predicate combinations of verbs has been of great interest to linguists. This paper thus deals with this topic with reference to the verb class Wirkungsverben ‚verbs of effect‘, such as gefährden ‚endanger‘, strapazieren ‚strain‘, belasten ‚put pressure on‘, behindern ‚hinder‘, stören ‚disturb‘, and schonen ‚do not strain‘, which refer to complex situations consisting of different sorts of sub-situations, namely, an event/process and a state, and behave as stative verbs on the whole. This paper argues that the complex stative nature of these verbs is properly captured by adopting a predicate that defines a property of the events/processes that the state accompanies.
