Menon & Pancheva (2014) conjecture that the roots of all property concepts (words expressing the semantic content of adjectives in English; Dixon 1982, Thompson 1989), independent of syntactic category, have an abstract mass noun semantics in the spirit of Francez & Koontz-Garboden (2015, 2017). According to this conjecture, variation in the morphosemantics of categorization masks this underlying universality, leading to superficial variation in the morphosyntax of predication within this class of words. Supporting this line of analysis, we show that morphologically transparent behavior of nouns, verbs and adjectives in Ulwa, Wá·šiw, and English reveals that despite variation in category, property concepts in these languages receive a unified analysis on the view that mass-denoting roots are categorized by nominalizing, verbalizing, and adjectivizing heads, respectively, that introduce a possessive semantics.

Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2010) argue that verbs fall into (at least) two classes: result verbs (e.g., break ) and manner verbs (e.g., run ). No verb encodes both manner and result simultaneously, a truth-conditional fact that Rappaport Hovav and Levin argue follows from how verb meanings are composed at the level of event structure. However, a key issue in verifying this claim is isolating truth-conditional diagnostics for manner and result. We develop and review a number of such diagnostics and show that there are verbs that encode both meanings together, counterexemplifying their truth-conditional complementarity. However, using evidence from scopal adverbs, we argue that when the meanings occur together, they are encoded in a single, undecomposable manner+result root at event structure. This fact validates complementarity as a fact about how many and what types of roots may occur in an event structure, though it also argues for a richer typology of roots than is typically assumed, including those encoding manner and result simultaneously.