Towards verb modification in frames: A case study on German “schlagen” (to hit)

Hit-verbs have three basic meaning components, namely movement, contact and force (e.g. [12], Levin 1993), which interact with the verbs’ argument structure in various ways. In this paper, we map out the different grammatical constructions of the German verb schlagen (usually, though loosely, translated as ‘hit’; also ‘beat’, ‘strike’) and their restrictions on agentivity and the force component. Using modification by pure manner adverbs as a tool to test for possible default values of the force component, and agent-oriented adverbs to discover possible interactions with agentivity, we show that German schlagen is rather liberal with respect to its force component. Crucially, the force component may not only be modified by standard, force-denoting manner adverbs such as lightly and hard, but also through agent-oriented adverbs such as playfully, via a defeasible inference. We show further that our findings can be profitably modelled in Frame Semantics, a framework which is especially well suited for modelling a fine-grained decomposition of word meaning, including the manner-related components of verbs.