I have been lucky to have had opportunities to work with many stimulating people during the course of researching and writing this work. This has surely helped to shape my thesis in ways I would never have been able to achieve on my own.
First and foremost I must thank my primary supervisor Alex Lascarides for her detailed and probing comments, delivered with amazing efficiency, and her constant encouragements. Claire Grover, my second supervisor, also deserves thanks for working through my representations and examples with a fine-toothed comb. Frank Schilder, Bernie Jones, and Alice Drewery have admirably tolerated my rantings about lexical semantics, and have even managed to solve a few sticking points for me. I would also like to thank Paul Buitelaar, Marc Verhagen, Jesse Tseng, Janet Hitzeman, Massimo Poesio, Gosse Bouma, and Ann Copestake for giving me feedback on various parts of this work.
In the early stages of this research, I spent some time at the Research Institute for Speech and Langauge (Onderzoeksinstituut voor Taal en Spraak, OTS) in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and I would like to thank Henk Verkuyl for discussing some underdeveloped ideas with me, and the OTS itself for making it possible. I also spent a few months at Brandeis University in Boston in 1996; this was an invaluable experience and I am grateful to Ray Jackendoff, Joan Maling, and James Pustejovsky for inviting me, making time to meet with me, and including me in everything. My colleagues in Boston, Vittorio Di Tomaso and Bhuvana Narasimhan, spent many tiring hours with me thinking about strange patterns in data, and were the inspiration for my work on manner of motion verbs. I thank the Doctor Catharine van Tussenbroek Foundation in the Netherlands and the Centre for Cognitive Science for making that trip possible.
Many thanks to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the World Bank, and my parents who have provided financial support to me during my time in Edinburgh. My parents, Adriaan and Antoinette, although very far away in India, always managed to keep me motivated. I am sure that I would never have achieved so much in life without their open-minded encouragement to explore.
Finally, I would like to thank my husband Vicente Uceda, for his soothing effect on me, and the love, care, support, and understanding which have carried me through some crazy times.