Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning and how word meaning figures into the grammars of human languages. It is easy to think that our mental vocabulary is like a dictionary: a giant, unorganized list of words with unique definitions. But decades of research in lexical semantics has shown that there are many recurring patterns and deeper principles about what words can and cannot mean, and what kinds of words exist within and across languages. These semantic patterns also often determine what kind of grammatical properties the word will have, such as what suffixes and prefixes it takes, whether it occurs with a direct object or not, and what kinds of adverbs and prepositions we can add to it. 

In this talk, John Beavers, Department Chair and Robert D. King Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas-Austin, introduces some of these concepts through the lens of a case study of the ways in which we describe events of giving and taking in English and Kinyarwanda. He will show the ways in which events of change of possession are often quite the same in the two languages, but also very different due to unique things about each language. In the end, he'll suggest that while we see similar big patterns in how word meaning and grammar are related across languages, the bits of a word's meaning that are truly unique also matter for how we use it.