Participles, State Predicates, and Linking Verbs: A Two-Channel Anchor Semantics

This paper develops an anchor-based account of English participle predication and linking-verbselection. The central empirical contrast is familiar but under-modeled: a participial predicatelicensed under the copula (e.g., be + broken) typically carries stronger world-commitment thanthe same participle licensed under a perceptual or evidential anchor(look/seem/appear/sound/feel). We argue that this is not a syntactic accident and not reducible tolexical stipulation. Instead, anchors are analyzed as operators that stabilize a state descriptionrelative to an information channel (perceptual, inferential, reportative, affective), and theanchoring channel controls (i) commitment strength, (ii) complement selection, and (iii) scopeinteractions with negation and polarity. We report frequency and collocational profiles of anchorlemmas and their local complement signatures. We then present a worked formalization with anenriched event→state anchoring variant for result participles, and we derive concrete predictionsin the form of compatibility matrices and acceptability stimulus kits.This manuscript makes a defensible and nontrivial contribution by reframing English linkingverbs (be, look, seem, appear, sound, feel) as a channel-parameterized state-anchoringoperator whose grammar can be evaluated via an executable signature assay rather than posthoc description. The strongest novelty is the coupling of (i) a compositional anchor operator with(ii) a discrete Anchor×ComplementType compatibility matrix treated as a falsifiableconstraint system, and (iii) a theorem-level consequence (the No-true-cancellation result) thatforces a specific class of scope/repair predictions distinguishing the proposal from “bleachedcopula,” “raising-only,” and scalar evidential alternatives. Importantly, the paper goes beyondschematic predictions by reporting execution outputs from the Table2→Table7 recoverymapper—quantifying matrix–profile concordance (mismatch ≈0.94% with uncertainty) and arobust association signal (χ² with effect size)—thereby operationalizing “anchor geometry” as ameasurable object that can be exported to independent corpora, acceptability experiments, andcomputational evaluation. While the present quantitative results are explicitly proof-of-concept(derived from the manuscript’s extracted inventory rather than an external corpus), thecombination of formal forcing consequences + measured recovery performance + ready-torun protocol positions the work as a methodologically novel semantic assay with cleardiscriminants and a credible path to immediate external validation.