CORPOREAL

This type covers verbs dealing with bodily gestures. All involve a Human role (which may be extended to animals), that is in Subject relation. There may be a second role, some Substance that is taken into or expelled out of the Human’s body—thus eat, dine (on), suck, smell, taste on the one hand, and spit, pee, vomit, fart on the other. Other CORPOREAL verbs refer just to bodily postures and states—dream, think (both of which also belong to the THINKING type), laugh, ache, die, etc. There is no clear division between the subclasses—one can swallow a pill or some water or just swallow, much in the way that one blinks; and one can cough, or cough something up.

Some of these verbs may have the Substance in O relation, but this is always omissible—She has eaten (lunch), She is vomiting (up) (her dinner), He is shitting (blood).

A number of CORPOREAL verbs may be followed by an NP that has a head noun cognate with the verb, e.g. He sneezed the most tremendous sneeze I have ever heard, I dreamt a really horrid dream, She died the most awful death. It would not usually be felicitous to use a cognate NP that did not include some adjectival modification—He sneezed a sneeze, I dreamt a dream are only likely to occur in the most extreme rhetorical style. Sometimes the description of a bodily gesture can be achieved through an adverb, e.g. He laughed raucously (as alternative to He laughed a raucous laugh) but English grammar has much more restricted possibilities for adverbial modification of verbs than for adjectival modification of nouns—hence the usefulness of cognate NPs (one would not say *She died awfully or *He sneezed (most) tremendously, and even? She died most awfully sounds a little odd). These cognate NPs have few of the properties of direct objects; for instance, they can only in fairly specific circumstances be the subject of a passive construction—one would scarcely say *The most awful death was died by her, although The same dream was dreamt by all of my brothers is acceptable.

It is hard to draw boundaries within this type. There do appear to be a number of subsets but these tend to merge into each other:

(a) verbs that can be followed by a direct object but not by a cognate NP: eat, dine (on), chew, suck, drink, smoke;

(b) those that can be followed by a direct object or by a cognate NP: bite (e.g. He bit off a piece of pie, He bit off a huge bite), nibble, sip; smell, feel, taste, sniff, swallow, breathe, smile, fart, burp, cough, spit, pee, vomit (and their synonyms); live;

(c) those that can only be followed by a cognate NP: yawn, sneeze, laugh, leer, wink, blink, sob, sleep, dream, think, die;

(d) those that cannot be followed by any NP: (d1) verbs that are solely intransitive, e.g. weep, cry, shiver, faint, pass out, wheeze, sweat, rest, ache, suffer, come to, recover, be born; (d2) those that also exist in causative form with the Human role (the original S) as transitive O, e.g. wake, waken, grow, swell, hurt, bleed, heal, drown.

A number of comments are in order about how individual verbs fit into this classification:

i. Drink and smoke exist as verbs and as independent nouns—He drank a drink (of tea) and She smoked that whole packet of/some smokes involve a Substance role in O slot, not a cognate NP.

ii. Dine is ‘eat the principal meal of the day’, with dinner, a noun (derived from the verb) describing that meal. One can specify the ingredients of the meal, after on, as in John dined on sausages and mash. (What one cannot say is *John dined on the dinner.)

iii. We can dream a horrid dream or dream a horrid nightmare. Nightmare is not cognate with the verb dream but it is a hyponym of the cognate noun dream, and behaves like a cognate NP (e.g. a horrid nightmare can scarcely be passivized).

iv. Laugh and cry can take a reflexive pronoun, followed by to-plus-verb or a result adjective, e.g. John cried himself to sleep, Mary laughed herself silly. These constructions are similar to John sang Timmie/himself to sleep, Mary talked Jane/herself into going, where the object can be, but need not be, identical to the subject. Note that the natures of the activities referred to by laugh and cry are such that one could not laugh or cry anyone else into anything (as one can sing or talk them); these verbs may be used transitively, but are then obligatorily reflexivezed. Both laugh and cry can be followed by a preposition plus an NP or ING complement clause describing the reason for the emotional reaction; e.g. Mary laughed about the experience, John cried over breaking his leg.

v. Live is mostly used intransitively, or else with a cognate NP (He lived a full and happy life). There are also limited possibilities for non-cognate NPs, e.g. He lived a dream/an illusion of reality/a lie. Jespersen (1909–49: part iii, p. 301) quotes His whole life seemed to be lived in the past, suggesting that for live (but perhaps not for other CORPOREAL verbs) the cognate NP should be considered a direct object (since it is passivisable), similar to non-cognate NPs such as a lie.

vi. Blink would not normally be followed by a cognate NP, as wink might be (He winked a comradely wink at me across the room), but it surely could be, if the circumstances were right (e.g. She blinked a rapid series of staccato blinks, before dying) and so is placed in set (c).

vii. In its literal sense swell is intransitive and should belong to (d1), but it does have a causative when used metaphorically (The new arrivals swelled the crowd), indicating membership of (d2).

Native speakers have intuitions that set (a), and bite, smell, feel and taste from set (b), are basically transitive, and that all the remainder are basically intransitive. As already mentioned, the subject is normally the Human role, except that for ache and hurt it is a body part of the Human (for bleed and grow the subject can be either a person or a body part). corporeal verbs such as grow and die may be extended as appropriate to animals and plants.

There are a number of transitive verbs which have the Human role in O slot and a meaning something like ‘make recover’, e.g. bring to (the causative correspondent of come to), comfort, console, cure, soothe, ease, nurse, doctor (the last two derived from nouns). Related to them are kill ‘make dead’—and its hyponyms such as murder ‘kill with premeditation’ and assassinate ‘kill a political figure for political reasons’—beat up, injure, wound, poison. All of these can be classified with the causatives of set (d2), as can give birth to, the transitive correspondent of be born.

Finally, there are a number of verbs which typically describe corporeal interaction between two people—, embrace, hug, cuddle,(and its many synonyms). These are basically symmetrical verbs: either Human can be in A with the other in O slot in a transitive construction, or else both may be covered by the subject NP of a reciprocal sentence, e.g. John kissed Mary, Mary kissed John, John and Mary kissed (each other).

Smell, taste and feel—referring to three of the human senses—involve intersection with two other types. They function in one way as ATENTION verbs (e.g. I tasted that it had gone off), and in another way like verbs of the SEEM type (It tasted burnt).