Within the literature on event types, there is a well-established distinction between dynamic eventualities, which involve some sort of change, and stative eventualities, which do not. Recent neoconstructionist theories seek to derive...
moreWithin the literature on event types, there is a well-established distinction between dynamic eventualities, which involve some sort of change, and stative eventualities, which do not. Recent neoconstructionist theories seek to derive event types and the interpretation of event participants—thematic roles—from the syntax of the verb phrase—argument structure. These models uniformly assign a privileged status to dynamic events either in focus or in the theoretical tools they assume, relegating states to a secondary status within the theory and as worthy objects
of empirical research.
However, states are not as different from events as it may seem: upon closer inspection, aspectual and thematic notions generally assumed to be exclusive to dynamic events, like agentivity, causativity and resultativity, can apply to states as well. More strikingly, a rich variety of thematic roles can be found within stative predicates (Experiencer/ Stimulus, Figure/ Ground, Initiator/ Resultee...), which raises the non-trivial question of how this diversity can be derived from an impoverished structure.
This dissertation addresses stative predicates within a general theory of event types from a neoconstructionist prism. I analyze a set of Spanish verbs, the gobernar ‘govern’-type and argue that they are derived by a bi-phrasal structure that is unambiguously interpreted as a stative causative eventuality, i.e. two states related causally. In so doing, I enrich the typology of event types taxonomically and theoretically, the latter by integrating stative causatives within a comprehensive syntactic model of event structure.
I also explore adjectival passives as a case study of derived statives. I show how these constructions are truly stative—and not perfective or resultative, as is often argued. The underlying participle is fed by different kinds of stative structures—unaccusative or causative. The former is lexicalized by typical telic verbs—i.e. verbs of change with an endpoint, e.g. break—whereas the latter is lexicalized by stative causative verbs—the gobernar-type. This explains many properties of adjectival passives crosslinguistically, and reinforces the idea that states also come in different types crosscategorially.
Finally, I uncover a series of crosslinguistic grammatical parallelisms be- tween stative object-experiencer psychological verbs (e.g. worry, amaze...) and locative verbs (e.g. surround, cover...). I argue that they share a uniform struc- ture, articulated by a silent birrelational preposition. This structure denotes an abstract relation between two entities that can be understood as locative or psy- chological depending on the lexical type of verb that lexicalizes it. I show how this proposal correctly derives the thematic interpretation of these stative pred- icates without the need to resort to thematic roles as grammatical primitives, in the spirit of the neoconstructionist program.
