[2014] Temporal Binding in the Event Analysis

Lingua, 2008

The rationale for bringing together work on tense, aspect and event structure is discussed. Papers by Gehrke, Ramchand, Zagona, Basilico, Van Hout, Guéron and Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria are described, and the connections and disparities between them considered. # Over the past 15 years, generative linguists have devoted intensive study to the syntax and semantics of event structure, making considerable progress in the syntactic of fundamental notions such as state, activity, achievement, accomplishment and semelfactive, and significantly elucidating the relationship between these analyses and verbal semantics, including event decomposition and theta-role assignment. A fairly coherent picture of vP-internal syntax and semantics has emerged in the work of such investigators as Ramchand, van Hout, Borer, Basilico, and the present authors, among many others.

2005

In this paper, I will examine the way in which two Spanish aspectual periphrases contributing pluractional aspectual operators interact with indefinite, quantified and plural noun-phrases, with the aim of arriving at a better understanding of these aspectual operators. I will show that, although temporal pluractional operators of the sort proposed by Van Geenhoven (2004, 2005) can adequately capture the temporal structure of the derived eventuality descriptions contributed by two Spanish motion-verb periphrases, they should not be allowed to enter into scopal interactions with nominal arguments. The very peculiar pattern of interaction with plural and quantified NP arguments labelled ‘distribution' has parallels in the nominal domain. These parallels provide strong support for the relevance of the distinction between sums and groups in the event domain. They show, furthermore, that pluractional aspectual operators – of the type represented by these two Spanish periphrases – cruc...

Quantification is perceived as a phenomenon characteristic of the nominal domain. Determiners, prototypically involved in building generalised quantifiers, syntactically combine with nominal elements. The things that constitute the DI are typically expressed by nominals. However, they are not the only things that can be quantified over. The present paper discusses the quantification of events and an analogy between locative sentences in the spatial and temporal domains, in the spirit of Partee’s (1973, 1984) observations of analogies between tenses and pronouns.

Synthese, 2000

Journal of Child Language, 2008

ABSTRACTThai has imperfective aspectual morphemes that are not obligatory in usage, whereas English has obligatory grammaticized imperfective aspectual marking on the verb. Furthermore, Thai has verb final deictic-path verbs that form a closed class set. The current study investigated if obligatoriness of these grammatical categories in Thai and English affects the expression of co-occurring temporal events and actions depicted in three different short animations. Ten children aged four years, five years, six years and seven years, and ten adults as a comparison group from each of the two languages participated. English speakers explicitly expressed the ongoingness of the events more than Thai speakers, whereas Thai speakers expressed the entrance and exit of protagonists depicted in the animations significantly more than English speakers. These results support the notion that obligatory grammatical categories shape how Thai and English speakers express temporal events or actions.

One of the longstanding problems in linguistic analysis is to identify, describe and analyse the lexical aspect classes allowed in natural language. Recent developments in this issue (Maienborn) have raised two interrelated questions: how many event classes there are and how they are derived from a minimum of primitives. In this article we identify a class of predicates denoting the maintenance of a situation through which 13 tests can be shown to display mixed properties between states and activities, challenging the existing taxonomies of aspectual classes. We furthermore argue that the existence of this class is expected by any theory that treats aspectual classes as epiphenomena of the combination of a restricted set of primitives, and propose an analysis where they contain a central coincidence preposition selected by an eventive layer.

Minds and Machines, 1997

Theoretical Linguistics, 2006

In [HKL00] (henceforth HKL), Hamm, Kamp and van Lambalgen declare ''there is no opposition between formal and cognitive semantics,'' notwithstanding the realist/mentalist divide. That divide separates two sides Jackendo¤ has (in [Jac96], following Chomsky) labeled E(xternalized)-semantics, relating language to a reality independent of speakers, and I(nternalized)-semantics, revolving around mental representations and thought. Although formal semanticists have (following David Lewis) traditionally leaned towards E-semantics, it is reasonable to apply formal methods also to I-semantics. This point is made clear in HKL via two computational approaches to natural language semantics, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, [KR93]) and the Event Calculus (EC) presented in . In this short note, I wish to raise certain questions about EC that can be traced to the applicability of formal methods to E-semantics and I-semantics alike. These opposing orientations suggest di¤erent notions of time, event and representation.

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.

Synthese, 2010

In this paper, I will examine the way in which two Spanish aspectual periphrases contributing pluractional aspectual operators interact with indefinite, quantified and plural noun-phrases, with the aim of arriving at a better understanding of these aspectual operators. I will show that, although temporal pluractional operators of the sort proposed by can adequately capture the temporal structure of the derived eventuality descriptions contributed by two Spanish motion-verb periphrases, they should not be allowed to enter into scopal interactions with nominal arguments. The very peculiar pattern of interaction with plural and quantified NP arguments labelled "distribution" has parallels in the nominal domain. These parallels provide strong support for the relevance of the distinction between sums and groups in the event domain. They show, furthermore, that pluractional aspectual operatorsof the type represented by these two Spanish periphrasescrucially differ from frequency adverbs such as repeatedly, occasionally.

1997

ftp site: ftp.unive.it Contents p. 1 Abstract " 1 1. Introduction " 2 2. Interpreting Temporal Locations " 2 2.1 Conceptual Representations " 2 3. Aspect and the TD feature " 4 4. Quantifiers and Interpretation " 6 5. Global vs Internal: two features for event structure " 8 6. Factuality and the Structure of events " 11 7. Event structure and Quantification " 14 8. Quantifier Raising " 18 8.1 Uniqueness and Genericity " 21 9. The algorithm for temporal interpretation " 23 9.1 Tense and Aspect: two separate relations with Time Reference " 25 9.2 Implementing Allen's algorithm " 27 9.3 Semantic representations " 29 10. References " 31 11 Acknowledgements " 32

One of the longstanding problems in linguistic analysis is to determine the nature of Aktionsart and the kind of representations that account for the different aspectual classes of predicates. Recent developments in this issue (Maienborn 2005; Borer 2005; Ramchand 2008; MacDonald 2008; Rothmayr 2009) have raised two interrelated questions: how many classes there are and how they can all be integrated in an analysis that explains their properties with a minimum of primitives. In this article we explore one class that seemingly has mixed properties of events and states, Davidsonian states, and we propose an analysis where they are integrated with the independently motivated classic Vendler-Dowty classification without requiring to posit new primitives or giving up the distinctive properties that differentiate between the classes. In doing so, we will argue for a separation of eventivity and dynamicity, the former caused by the presence of a designated syntactic head and the latter being the result of the interpretation of specific structures where the head that introduces the event takes as complement specific constituents that in combination with the event produce a change denotation, and with it, dynamicity.