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GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

(3a) Felix slapped a mosquito. (‘Felix killed a mosquito’)
(3b) Felix slapped at a mosquito. (‘Felix missed a mosquito’)

The sentences under (3) are identical apart from the preposition at in (3b).
Why should these sentences evoke such different interpretations? The
striking difference in meaning between the sentences cannot be due to
the lexical meaning of the preposition at but arises from the different
constructions. Sentence (3a) is a transitive construction with a subject
and a direct object. A property of transitive constructions with agents is
that their action affects the thing denoted by the direct object. The tran-
sitive sentence thus conveys that Felix’s slapping affected the mosquito
and invites the implicature that Felix succeeded in killing the insect. This
inferred interpretation of ‘killing’ is jointly triggered by the transitive
construction and our world knowledge about slapping mosquitoes. We
“know” that mosquitoes are nasty insects and people try to kill them by
slapping them.
Sentence (3b) is an intransitive construction with a prepositional ad-
junct. The adjunct at a mosquito denotes the target of an act of slapping.
The speaker obviously intended to express more than the fact that Felix
slapped at a mosquito, and it is up to the hearer to infer the missing infor-
mation. The grammatical construction conveys that the entity expressed
as a target was not affected by the action denoted by the verb. The meaning
that the speaker apparently intended to convey is that Felix wanted to kill
the mosquito by slapping it but he missed it and the mosquito flew away.
Inferential reasoning is, amongst others, guided by our knowledge
of frames. Frames are packages of knowledge about a coherent segment
of experience. We have a frame of nasty insects that sting us and suck
our blood, and when we hear the word mosquito it automatically triggers
the blood-sucking frame. but not everybody shares the same frame. The
episode of Felix and his slapping a mosquito develops further. His son,
15
surprised at the blood he noticed on his father’s arm, says: «Wow, dad,
that mosquito had a lot of blood in him.» His father responds: «That’s

15 Found on: https://cloudfront.crimethinc.com/pdfs/rolling_thunder_7.pdf
[16.04.2018].

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