The manner of cutting revisited

Abstract In the generative literature, whether manner/result complementarity is correct or not has been hotly debated. This paper aims to shed new light on the debate by approaching manner/result complementarity from a different angle: polysemy. Our focal example is cut . A detailed frame-semantic analysis of its polysemy reveals that the manner of cut is to be identified as something like ‘to move quickly in a straight line’. Accordingly, what counts as the manner use and what counts as the result use share the same base, differing only in terms of profiling. Thus, manner/result complementarity simply does not make sense.