Core events and adverbial modification

To appear In Robert Truswell (ed.) Handbook of Event Structure. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

A recurrent idea in linguistic theory is that predicates have complex syntactic representations that reflect their semantics. In the past twenty years or so linguistic theory has witnessed the return of lexical, or rather syntactic, decomposition approaches, which compose event structure from its meaning ingredients instantiated as distinct syntactic heads. These are essentially modernized versions of the proposals of Generative Semantics (McCawley 1968, Lakoff 1965), which answer many of the empirical objections to decomposition. This paper examines the decompositional project, concentrating on the various arguments presented in modern literature for a decompositional treatment of the relationship between pairs of verbs that differ roughly in that one of them has one more argument than the other. The paper shows that such pairs or alternations split into several types, only one of which deserves a decompositional analysis. Our litmus test for decomposition can be defined as follows: A meaning ingredient is a syntactic head, iff it is detectable by syntactic diagnostics.

Presentation at NELS, 1997

Universite du Quebec a MontrM and MIT 1.

Events as grammatical objects, 2000

Manual and Nonmanual Realizations of 'finish'

Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates, ed. B. Arsenijevic, B. Gehrke, R. Marín, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 93, 1-27, Springer., 2013

This chapter offers an overview of the advancements made in the semantic theory of events and introduces its central notions and current issues to serve as background information relevant for the contributions included in the volume. It is structured around two main axes: compositional and decompositional approaches to the semantics of event predicates. We argue that, while composition and decomposition are at times treated as two competing ways to deal with the semantics of event predicates, they can actually be seen as two sides of the same coin, as essential parts of the subatomic semantics of event predicates. Along with these two axes, we address how adverbial modification served as modification for event semantics as well as its use as diagnostics for the structural complexity or for particular properties of eventualities, such as (a)telicity or scalarity.

2012

Abstract This chapter offers an overview of the advancements made in the semantic theory of events and introduces its central notions and current issues to serve as background information relevant for the contributions included in the volume. It is structured around two main axes: compositional and decompositional approaches to the semantics of event predicates.

Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2015

This chapter provides an overview of semantic issues concerning manner and degree. This includes going over the theoretical questions that arise in the literature on VP modification and event semantics, as well as the research that has been carried out on gradable adjectives, scale structure and vagueness. This introduction further situates the papers and commentaries in this volume within this discussion. We end by outlining commonalities between manner and degree.

Lingua, 2007

This paper is an extension of the analysis of classifier predicates (CL predicates) in ASL in Benedicto and Brentari (2004) in order to account for event structure as well as argument structure, motivated by the specific claim that limb/body part classifiers (BPCL) are unergative predicates with single external arguments. If unergative, with a single external argument, BPCL should not be able to express telic events (events containing natural semantic endpoints) because such events require a quantified or specified (delimited) internal argument, or some entity the event can apply to exhaustively. We show that BPCL can express telic as well as atelic events, indicating a contradiction with their claim that BPCL are unergative. We argue that BPCL do in fact contain internal arguments, realized as a morphemic specification for selected fingers in the handshape of the CL predicate that B&B associate in handling (HCL) and whole entity (w/e CL) CL with an internal argument, although this does not entail telicity. This evidence indicates that BPCL are in fact transitive, as are HCL, with the internal argument representing a body part of the referent external argument. We adopt a sub-event analysis of event structure (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995) and following the claims of the Event Visibility Hypothesis for ASL (Wilbur, 2004a,b,c, 2005, in press; Schalber, 2004) demonstrate that telic and atelic events in ASL are morphologically and phonologically contrastive, in both CL and non-CL predicates, with the endpoints of telic events overtly marked morphologically. We demonstrate that telic BPCL also show these markings, supporting the claim that these CL predicates are transitive and not unergative. We adapt the syntactic analysis of Benedicto and Brentari to account for telicity following insights from Ramchand (in preparation) and Borer (2005). In addition, we show why the tests provided by Benedicto and Brentari to indicate the presence of an internal argument are not applicable for BPCL. Extensions of this analysis to non-CL predicates and instrument CL (ICL) are also discussed.

Anuario Del Seminario De Filologia Vasca Julio De Urquijo, 2011