List 9: miscellaneous verbs

A. meals: lunch, luncheon, breakfast, ⁺brunch, snack, ⁺cheeseburger, supper, picnic, banquet, feast (somewhere on something), ⁺I dinner’d wi’ a lord [Burns], ⁺nightcap, ⁺liquor, booze, wine, ⁺grub, nosh, ⁺you could come and tea with me [Dickens].

B. crops: ⁺blackberry in the woods, ⁺nut in the woods, hay the top field, ⁺timber off the hills, log the west slopes, ⁺crab, fish, shrimp, ⁺shark, whale, ⁺pearl, ⁺sponge (for a living); ⁺mouse, ⁺ termite.

C. parts: ⁺his ball lipped the cup (failed to go in, golf); ⁺the shot rimmed off the basket (basketball), wing the bird, ⁺kneecap the businessman, ⁺rear-end the van, ⁺rim the glass with salt, bean the catcher (baseball), ⁺blindside a player (hit on the blind side).

D. elements: rain, snow, hail, sleet.

E. other: ⁺we housed [hawst] your wife’s steak (put the steak ‘on the house’).

The first type has parent nouns that are meals or foods:

(15) Jeff lunched on a hotdog and a coke.

(16) Jeff ate a lunch of a hotdog and a coke.

In 16, lunch is in the objective case, so the verb lunch could be called an object verb. The category, however, is much more restricted than the name ‘object verb’ suggests.

The next type is much like the locatum verb with negative prepositions:

(17) Roger hayed the top field.

(18) Roger caused it to come about that [hay was not in the top field].

But these crop verbs differ from the earlier locatum verbs in that the location does not have to be mentioned, e. g. Roger hays for a living; the emphasis is more on collecting hay than on ridding the field of it. It is as if these verbs, like leash and net, are instrumental, in that collecting the hay is achieved in part by taking it from the field. In any case, their meanings are more complex than those of locatum verbs with negative prepositions like pit and core.

The third type is another variety of object verb, but one in which the verb denotes an action that happens to the entity denoted by the parent noun that itself is part of the entity denoted by the surface object:

(19) The car rear-ended the van.

(20) The car did to the rear-end that belonged to the van the action one would normally expect [a car to do to a rear-end].

With lip and rim, the ball and shot careened off these parts; with rear-end, the car crashed into that part; and with wing and kneecap, the agent injured these parts. But clearly these paraphrases do not do justice to the surplus meanings in each expression.

Finally, there are a few element verbs, which are still another kind of object verb, since they denote the activities characteristic of rain, snow, hail, and sleet. It is raining might be paraphrased ‘It (the weather) is doing the activity that one would normally expect [rain to do]’.

These categories don’t really do justice to denominal verbs. Many examples don’t fit neatly into these categories, and others have the characteristics of more than one category at a time. For example, instrument verbs like leash and net seem to have properties of both instrument and locatum or location verbs, and the crop verbs hay and log combine properties of negative locatum and part verbs. Smoke, as in George smokes the pipe, provides another example. Because George causes the pipe to produce smoke, it could be a goal verb. Because he extracts smoke from the pipe, it could be a locatum verb with a negative preposition. And because he does what one would do with smoke — namely, inhale and exhale — it could also be an instrument verb, though of an odd sort. Smoke seems to belong to all three categories at once. Its complexity probably has a historical explanation. It may once have had clear limits but with time has become specialized for the particular activity we call smoking. Its origins as a noun are recognizable only on reflection. The same process has worked on many other denominal verbs as well; so it isn’t surprising that they don’t fit neatly into these categories.