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Theories of verb meaning usually assume that verbs are organized in a
language's vocabulary either in terms of the kinds of events or states
they describe, or else in terms of the kinds of entities that
participate in those events and states. These basic semantic concepts
are furthermore assumed to be organized into semantic structures ---
events that are broken into subevents, or coherent casts of
participants --- that determine what sorts of prefixes and suffixes a
verb takes and what sorts of other phrases it combines with, i.e. its
grammatical properties. In this talk I explore the ins and outs of
such theories. I suggest that in many cases the proposed semantic
structures are not motivated by anything other than the grammatical
properties they were meant to explain. I show instead that a theory of
a verb's grammatical properties can instead be based on the actual
meanings of the words, i.e. what must be true of the world to even use
the word, and the ways word meanings contrast with one another. I also
explore several other factors that govern how words are used
grammatically, including pragmatics and common conventions of word
usage. The case studies I explore come from data on English,
Colloquial Sinhala, Bahasa Indonesian, and the Uto-Aztecan language
O'dam. I ultimately suggest that the relationship of word meaning to
grammar is governed by a soup of factors, but with actual meaning at
the heart of it all.