Calculating scales from change of state verbs and their themes

In this paper I explore in detail the internal aspectual structure of events focusing on two Spanish change of state verbs. I begin by establishing the lexically coded scales of romper 'break' and congelar 'freeze'. Based on a large collection of corpus concordances of these verbs I then consider some theme arguments which these verbs typically combine with and explore the effects of the mereological structure of the theme on the scalarity of the verb phrases containing these verbs. Comparing the two verbs I find that simple scales coded in the verb can be overridden by complex scales coming from the theme, while complex scales in verbs are not reducible through combining them with a reduced argument. The research thus illustrates that, despite the general assumption that change of state verbs lexically encode certain kinds of scales, their scalar behaviour at the verb phrase level can undergo adjustments. The semantics of a scalar verb is provided within the measure of change function analysis (Kennedy & Levin 2008; Kennedy 2012).