The Grammar of hitting, breaking, and cutting in Kimaragang Dusun

The hit, break, and cut classes of verbs are grammatically relevant in Kimaragang, as in English. The relevance of such classes for determining how arguments are expressed suggests that the meaning of a verb is composed of (a) systematic components of meaning (the event template); and (b) idiosyncratic properties of the individual root. Assuming this approach to be essentially correct, I compare grammatical phenomena in Kimaragang that are sensitive to verb class membership with phenomena that are not class-sensitive. The tendency that emerges is that class-sensitive alternations do not seem to be affix-dependent, and are quite restricted in their ability to introduce new arguments into the argument structure.