The Semantics of Verbs 'sleep', 'to sleep', and 'wake up'

Abstract

The present research is an attempt to investigate the three verbs 'sleep', 'to sleep', and 'wake up' from a semantic point of view. It is the verb that determines the situation and, therefore, we shall prove that a verb like 'sleep' indicates a state whereas'to sleep'indicates an action for the reason that they are usually associated with a change of state or not.The 'structure of roles' shows the manner by which a participant takes part in a certain situation.This notion adopted in this paper belongs to the well-known linguists Charles Fillmore (1968) and Lucien Tesniere (1959). It is argued in this research that the syntactic form in which to sleep occurs is different from 'sleep' and that semantically they belong to different types of meaning,Finally, we intend to prove universality on the results arrived at in this work.