Publications and Presentations

NOTE: Google Drive had a security update recently that broke all of these links, which is really annoying. I will fix them soon, but if you want a paper just email me.

Please contact me if you would like copies of any manuscripts or handouts not linked here.

Books:

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2020). The Roots of Verbal Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Updated 07/09/2019).

Peer-reviewed journal articles:

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (In prep). Agentive and Non-agentive Internally Caused Change-of-State Verb Roots. Unpublished ms., The University of Texas and The University of Manchester.

Lindia Tjuatja, John Beavers, and Venus Shirazy. (In prep). *This Paper Does Not Write Easily: Affectedness without Change-of-State.  Unpublished ms., The University of Texas at Austin.

Udayana, I Nyoman, I Made Netra, I Nyoman Sedeng, John Beavers. (Under review). Covert Reciprocals in Indonesian. Unpublished ms., Udayana University and The University of Texas at Austin.

Beavers, John and Kyle Jerro (Under review). The Role of Root Semantics in Determining Argument Alternations. Unpublished ms., The University of Texas at Austin and San Diego State University.

Beavers, John and I Nyoman Udayana. (2023).  Middle Voice as Generalized Argument Suppression: The Case from Indonesian.  Ms., The University of Texas at Austin and Udayana University. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 41: 51-102.

Beavers, John, Michael Everdell, Kyle Jerro, Henri Kauhanen, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, Elise LeBovidge, and Stephen Nichols. (2021). Two Types of States: A Cross-linguistic Study of Change-of-State Verb Roots. Language 97: 439-484.

Beavers, John and Juwon Lee. (2020). Non-Culmination in Korean Caused Change-of-State Predicates. Linguistics 58: 1233-1283 (special issue).

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2017). Result verbs, scalar change, and the typology of motion verbs. Language 93: 842-876.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2013). Complications in Diagnosing Lexical Meaning:  A Rejoinder to Horvath and Siloni (2013). Lingua. 134:210-218.

Beavers, John. (2013). Aspectual Classes and Scales of Change. Linguistics (special issue), 54: 681-706.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2013). In Defense of the Reflexivization Analysis of Anticausativization. Lingua, 131: 199-216. [Reply to Horvath and Siloni 2011].

Beavers, John and Cala Zubair. (2013). Anticausatives in Sinhala: Involitivity and Causer Suppression.Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 31: 1-46.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2012). Manner and Result in the Roots of Verbal Meaning. Linguistic Inquiry. 43: 331-369.

Beavers, John. (2011). On Affectedness. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 29: 335-370.

Beavers, John. (2011). An Aspectual Analysis of Ditransitive Verbs of Caused Possession in English. Journal of Semantics. 28: 1-54.

Beavers, John. (2010). The Structure of Lexical Meaning: Why Semantics Really Matters. Language. 86: 821-864.

Beavers, John, Beth Levin, and Shiao Wei Tham. (2010). The Typology of Motion Expressions Revisited. Journal of Linguistics. 46: 331-377.

Beavers, John. (2008).On the Nature of Goal Marking and Delimitation: Evidence from Japanese. Journal of Linguistics. 44: 283-316.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2006). A Universal Pronoun in English? Linguistic Inquiry. 37: 503-513.

Peer-reviewed book chapters:

Beavers, John. (2017). The Spray/Load Alternation. In Martin Everaert, Henk van Rimsdijk, Rob Goedemans, and Bart Hellebrandse, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 4011-4041.  Oxford:  Wiley-Blackwell.

Beavers, John and Peter Sells. (2013). Constructing and Supporting a Linguistic Analysis. In Robert J. Podesva and Devyani Sharma, eds., Research Methods in Linguistics, 403-427.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beavers, John. (2012). Lexical Aspect and Multiple Incremental Themes. In Violeta Demonte and Louise McNally, eds., Telicity, Change, and State: A Cross-Categorial View of Event Structure, 23-59.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beavers, John. (2012). Resultative Constructions. In Robert I. Binnick, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect, 908-933. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beavers, John and Chiyo Nishida. (2010). The Spanish Dative Alternation Revisited. In Sonia Colina, Antxon Olarrea, and Ana Carvalho, eds., Romance Linguistics 2009: Selected Papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, 217-230. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Beavers, John and Cala Zubair. (2010). The Interaction of Transitivity Features in the Sinhala Involitive. In Patrick Brandt and Marco Garcia, eds., Transitivity. Form, Meaning, Acquisition, and Processing, 69-94. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Beavers, John. (2009). Predicting Argument Realization from Oblique Marker Semantics. In Ronald P. Leow, Hector Campos, and Donna Lardiere, eds., Little Words: Their History, Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, and Acquisition, 121-130. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Beavers, John. (2008). Scalar Complexity and the Structure of Events. In Johannes Dölling, Tatjana Heyde-Zybatow, and Martin Schäfer, eds., Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation, 245-265. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Baldwin, Timothy, John Beavers, Leonoor van der Beek, Francis Bond, Dan Flickinger, and Ivan A. Sag. (2006). In Search of a Systematic Treatment of Determinerless PPs. In Patrick Saint-Dizier, ed., Syntax and Semantics of Prepositions, 163-180. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

Baldwin, Timothy, John Beavers, Emily M. Bender, Dan Flickinger, Ara Kim, and Stephan Oepen. (2005). Beauty and the Beast: What Running a Broad-Coverage Precision Grammar over the BNC Taught Us about the Grammar – and the Corpus. In Stephan Kepser and Marga Reis, eds., Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives, 49-70. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Peer-reviewed conference papers:

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2017). The Semantic Contribution of Idiosyncratic Roots in Ditransitive Verbs. In Brendel, Cole, Aaron Kaplan, Abby Kaplan, Miranda McCarvel, Jeff Pynes, and Ed Rubin (eds.), Proceedings of the 34th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 70-80, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA.

Koontz-Garboden, Andrew and John Beavers. (2017). Change of State Verbs and the Semantics of Roots. In Brendel, Cole, Aaron Kaplan, Abby Kaplan, Miranda McCarvel, Jeff Pynes, and Ed Rubin (eds.), Proceedings of the 34th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 347-354, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA.

Beavers, John and Cala Zubair. (2016). Anticausatives in Sinhala: A View to the Middle. In Rahul Balusu and Sandhya Sundaresan (eds.), Proceedings of FASAL 2015. 84-108.

Beavers, John and Itamar Francez. (2012). Several problems for Predicate Decompositions. In Zhenya Anti, Charles B. Chang, Emily Cibelli, Jisup Hong, Michael J. Houser, Clare S. Sandy, Maziar Toosarvandani, Yao Yao,Proceedings of Berkeley Linguistics Society 32, Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, 37-48.

Beavers, John. (2009). Multiple Incremental Themes and Figure/Path Relations. In Tova Friedman and Satoshi Ito, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XVIII, 90-107. Ithaca: Cornell University, http://hdl.handle.net/1813/13028.

Beavers, John, Elias Ponvert, and Stephen Wechsler. (2009). Possession of a Controlled Substantive: Light ‘have’ and Other Verbs of Possession. In Tova Friedman and Satoshi Ito, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XVIII, 108-125. Ithaca: Cornell University, http://hdl.handle.net/1813/13029.

Beavers, John. (2006). Semantic Underspecificity in English Argument/Oblique Alternations. In Michal Temkin Martínez, Asier Alcázar, and Roberto Mayoral Hernández, eds., Proceedings of Western Conference on Linguistics 2004, 26-37. Los Angeles: University of Southern California.

Beavers, John. (2005). Towards a Semantic Analysis of Argument/Oblique Alternations in HPSG. In Stefan Müller, ed., Proceedings of the 2005 Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Conference, 28-48. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Beavers, John. (2004). Type-Inheritance Combinatory Categorial Grammar. In Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 57-63. Geneva: University of Geneva.

Beavers, John and Ivan A. Sag. (2004). Coordinate Ellipsis and Apparent Non-Constituent Coordination. In Stefan Müller, ed., Proceedings of the 2004 Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Conference, 48-69. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Beavers, John. (2003). More Heads and Less Categories: A New Look at Noun Phrase Structure. In Stefan Müller, ed., Proceedings of the 2003 Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Conference, 47-67. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2003). The Proper Treatment of Your Ass in English. In Balder ten Cate, ed., Proceedings of the Student Workshop at the 2003 European Summer School of Logic, Language, and Information, 1-11. Vienna.

Working papers:

Beavers, John. (2002). Aspect and the Distribution of Prepositional Resultative Phrases in English. LinGO Working Paper No. 2002-07. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, http://lingo.stanford.edu/working-papers.html.

Beavers, John. (2002). Documentation: A CCG Implementation for the LKB. LinGO Working Paper No. 2002-08. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, http://lingo.stanford.edu/working-papers.html.

Invited Talks:

Beavers, John. (2018). TBA. Endpoints, scales, and results in the decomposition of verbal predicates. Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, January 30th-February 1st, 2018.

Beavers, John. (2017). Change-of-State in the Roots of Verbs: A Typological Study. Beyond Time: Unifying Temporal and Non-Temporal Uses of Aspectual Constructions, April 7-8, 2017, The University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO.

Beavers, John. (2015). Roots and Templates in Verbal Meaning. The University of Texas at Arlington Student Conference in Linguistics and TESOL 2015, November 6, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX.

Beavers, John. (2015). Scalar Change and Manner/Result Complementarity in Manner of Motion Verbs. Roots IV, June 29-July 2nd, New York University, New York, NY.

Beavers, John. (2015). Anticausatives in Sinhala: A View to the Middle. Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages 5, April 11-12, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Beavers, John. (2014). Middle Voice as a Syntax/Semantics Mismatch: Evidence from Indonesian. Workshop on Formal Linguistics X, August 28-29, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Su, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Beavers, John. (2014). Incrementality in Lexical Aspect. Chronos 11, June 16-18, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy.

Beavers, John. (2013). The Interaction of Roots and Templates in Verbal Meaning.  The 5th International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English, Sept 25-29, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

Beavers, John. (2013). Spanish Ditransitives as Verbs of Scalar Change.  The Zustandsveränderung (Change of state) session of the XXXIII. Deutscher Romanistentag, Sept 23-25, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.

Beavers, John. (2012). Manner/Result Complementarity and the Question of "Impossible" Verbs.  Nov 27th, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary.

Beavers, John. (2012). Manner/Result Complementarity and the Limits of Event Structure.  Plenary at Concept Types and Frames, Aug 22-24th, Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.

Beavers, John. (2012). Commentary on Paper by Michael Freedman.  Invited commentary for Texas Linguistics Society XV, June 23-24th, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

Beavers, John. (2012). Towards a Semantic Typology of Anticausativization. Workshop on Argument Structure, May 25-27th, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary.

Beavers, John. (2011). Roots, Argument Structures, and Lexical Entailments.  Structuring the Argument, Sept 5-7th, Université Paris 8 -- Centre national de la recherche scientifique 8, Paris, France.

Beavers, John. (2010). Manner and/or Result (in Syntax and/or Semantics).  Plenary, Georgetown Linguistics Society, Feb. 12th-14th, Georgetown University, Washington, D.

Beavers, John. (2009). Incremental Themes and Aspectual Classes.  Events and Subevents,  Sept.\ 17th-19th, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -- Paris 3, Paris, 

Beavers, John. (2009). Aspectual Classes and Scales of Change.  Events across categories: Theoretical and experimental approaches to event structure,  May 27-28, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.

Beavers, John. (2008). Verbs in Motion:  Revisiting Talmy's Typology.  October 30, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX.

Beavers, John. (2008). Towards a Partly Aspectual Understanding of Affectedness.  April 4, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Beavers, John. (2007). Deconstructing Affectedness: A Hierarchical Approach. April 13, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, 

Beavers, John. (2007). Semantic Prominence in the Syntax: A Case Study in English Object/Oblique Alternations.  February 23, The University of Kentucky at Lexington, Lexington, KY.

Beavers, John. (2007). Prominence Preservation in Argument Realization: Some Morphosyntactic Consequences.  February 19, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2006). Expressive Capability Trumps Syntax: A Case Study in Colloquial English Pronominals.  First Workshop on Dialect Syntax, November 10, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Beavers, John. (2006). Prominence Preservation at the Syntax/Semantics Interface.  May 16, Simon Fraser University., Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Beavers, John. (2006). Lexical Semantic Prominence as Implicational Structure.  February 6,  The University of California at San Diego, San Diego, CA.

Beavers, John. (2006). Lexical Semantic Prominence as Implicational Structure.  February 2, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

Beavers, John. (2005). Thematic Roles and Argument/Oblique Alternations.  Stanford Semantics Workshop, March 1, Stanford University, Stanford CA.

Beavers, John. (2003). Goal Marking in Japanese at the Event and Predicate Levels. Stanford Semantics Workshop, September 30, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Conference Presentations (With Separately Reviewed or No Proceedings)

Valle, Daniel, John Beavers, and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2017). State and Change of State in Kakataibo: The Role of Root Semantics. The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas 2017, January 5-8, Austin, TX.

Beavers, John, Michael Everdell, Kyle Jerro, Henri Kauhanen, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, Elise LeBovidge, and Stephen Nichols. (2017). Two Types of States: A Cross-linguistic Study of Change-of-State Verb Roots. 91st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 5-8, Austin, TX.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2016). Change of State Verbs and the Semantics of Roots. Workshop on the Aspect and Argument Structure of Adjectives and Participles III, June 13th-14th, Université de Lille, Lille, France.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2016). The Semantic Contribution of Idiosyncratic Roots in Ditransitive Verbs. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 34, poster session, April 29th-May 1st, 2016, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Beavers, John and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. (2016). Change of State Verbs and the Semantics of Roots. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 34, poster session, April 29th-May 1st, 2016, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Beavers, John and I Nyoman Udayana. (2015). Middle Voice in Indonesian: a Syntax/Semantics Mismatch. Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute 2015 Poster Session, July 12, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Beavers, John and Cala Zubair. (2014). Default Case and the Involitive in Colloquial Sinhala. Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages 4, March 29-30, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

Udayana, Nyoman and John Beavers. (2013). Middle Voice in Indonesian. 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 3-6, Boston, MA.

Tham, Shiao Wei, Beth Levin, and John Beavers. (2012). Directional Interpretations with Locative Adpositions. Workshop in The Meaning of P, November 23-25, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.

Beavers, John and Cala Zubair. (2012). Dative Subject Case in Sinhala:  A Semantically Constrained Default.  South Asian Languages:  Theory, Typology, and Diachrony, September 28-30, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Beavers, John and Cala Zubair. (2012). A Quirky Case Hierarchy in the Sinhala Involitive.  Non-Canonically Case-Marked Subjects Within and Across Languages and Language Families: Stability, Variation and Change, June4-8, The University of Iceland, Reykjavík and Hótel Hekla, Iceland.

Beavers, John and Alexandra Teodorescu. (2012). Repetition Effects in the Syntactic Domain. A New Analysis of Romanian Possessives.   The 14th Annual Conference of the English Department of the University of Bucharest, Romania, May 31-June 2, Bucharest, Romania.

Beavers, John and Alexandra Teodorescu. (2011). Syntactic Haplology in Romanian Possessive Phrases. 85th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 5-8, Pittsburgh, PA.

Beavers, John. (2010). Semantic Specificity and The Interaction of Root and Template Meaning. Verb Meaning, Event Semantics and Argument Structure, December 3-5,  Universitat Autónoma, Barcelona, Spain.

Beavers, John and Cala Zubair. (2010). Anticausatives in Sinhala: Involitivity and Causer Suppression.  Events and Subevents, October 28-30, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, Paris, France.

Beavers, John. (2009). Deriving Aspectual Classes from Scales of Change.  Texas Linguistics Society XII, November 13-15, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

Koontz-Garboden, Andrew and John Beavers. (2009). Manner and Result Verbs. Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, September 6-9, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

Koontz-Garboden, Andrew and John Beavers. (2009). Is there a manner/result complementarity in verbal roots? Roots: Word Formation from the Perspective of ``Core Lexical Elements'', June 10-12, Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany.

Levin, Beth, John Beavers, and Shiao-Wei Tham. (2009).  Manner of motion roots across languages: same or different? Roots: Word Formation from the Perspective of ``Core Lexical Elements'', June 10-12,  Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany.

Beavers, John and Chiyo Nishida. (2009). The Dative Alternation in Spanish:  Syntax or Semantics?  The 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, March 26-29, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Tucson, AZ.

Koontz-Garboden, Andrew and John Beavers. (2009). Questioning the manner/result complementarity.  10th Annual Stanford Semantics Fest, March 13-14, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Beavers, John. (2009). A Scalar Approach to Aspectual Classes.  Verb Typologies Revisited:  A Cross-Linguistic Reflection on Verbs and Verb Classes, February 5-7, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.

Beavers, John and Cala Zubair. (2008). Low Transitivity and Detransitivization in Sinhala. Workshop on Transitivity, November 14-15, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany.

Beavers, John. (2008). Variation in Argument Realization: Why Semantics Really Matters.  NORMS Workshop on Argument Structure,  February 5-6, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.

Zubair, Cala and John Beavers. (2008). Non-Nominative Subjects and the Involitive Construction in Sinhala.   82nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 3-6, Chicago, IL.

Beavers, John. (2008). The True Role of Affectedness in NP-Preposing.  82nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 3-6, Chicago, IL.

Beavers, John. (2007). Predicting Argument Realization from Preposition Semantics.  Georgetown Roundtable of Linguistics, March 8-11, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Beavers, John. (2007). The Interaction of Causation and Affectedness in Transitivity.  Poster, Forces in Grammatical Structures, January 18-20, Université Paris 8 - Centre national de la recherche scientifique 8, Paris, France.

Beavers, John. (2007). The Role of Durativity in Argument Realization.   81st Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 4-7, Anaheim, CA.

Beavers, John. (2006). The Aspectual Behavior of Ditransitives in English. 80th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 5-8, Albuquerque, NM.

Beavers, John, Beth Levin, and Tham Shiao Wei.  (2006). The Typology of Motion Events Revisited.   80th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 5-8, Albuquerque, NM.

Beavers, John, Beth Levin, and Tham Shiao Wei.  (2004). A Morphosyntactic Basis for Variation in the Encoding of Motion. Diversity and Universals in Language, May 21-23, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Beavers, John. (2003). Scalar Complexity and the Structure of Events. Workshop on Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation, March 17-19, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.

Beavers, John. (2004). A Less Informative Take on Argument/Oblique Alternations in English. 5th Annual Stanford Semantics Fest.  Stanford University, CA.

Beavers, John and Emily Bender. (2004). Gapless Instrumental Relative Clauses in English. 78th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 8-11, Boston, MA.

Beavers, John. (2002). Aspect and the Distribution of Prepositional Resultative Phrases in English.  76th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, January 3-6, San Francisco, CA.