Verbhood and state/change of state lability across languages

Across languages, words with the meanings of adjectives in English (property
concept lexemes; Thompson 1989) often have translational equivalents that are nominal or verbal instead (Dixon 1982). Regardless of category, all languages have ways of describing changes into property concept states, which generally bear some derivational relation to the word describing the state the change is into. This paper offers a study into the typology of property concept state/change-of-state derivation, showing that variation in the category of the state word correlates with differences in the nature of this derivation. In particular, we show on the basis of a statistical analysis of state/change-of-state
derivation using data from the “Verbal Roots Across Languages” database that lack of morphological marking from state to change of state (what we call lability) is more likely when the simple state is verbal in category. We argue that this finding follows from the idea that only verbs can describe change-of-state events (even if not all verbs do), and implement this formally as the claim that only verbs can relate ordinary individuals to dynamic events.