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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Thursday, March 4, 12noon in 460-126:
Scalar Complexity and the Structure of Events
John Beavers (Stanford University)
The telicity of change-of-state events often correlates homomorphically to
privileged participants in the event (e.g. incremental themes, paths, cf.
Krifka (1989), Tenny (1992)). In this paper I adopt a general view of
such homomorphisms and apply them to durativity, arguing that the relevant
factor for understanding durativity is the complexity of the scale of
change. This correlation explains cooccurrence restrictions between
certain aspectual classes of verbs and result/goal XPs in resultative
constructions (e.g. non-gradable AdjPs only cooccurs with punctual Vs
(``John shot/*beat Bill dead'') (Wechsler 2002); PP[to] only cooccurs with
durative Vs (``John beat/*shot Bill to death'') (Beavers 2002)). This
correlation also underlies the interpretation of inherent change-of-state
Vs, e.g. the traditional difference between achievements and
accomplishments as well as change-of-state Vs that allow variable
durativity interpretations (commensurate with variable gradability
interpretations). I provide a mereological account (Krifka 1998) of this
correlation by assuming that all dynamic Vs have both event and scale
arguments and entail a homomorphic mapping between these two arguments
that preserves mereological complexity. Lexical and contextual factors
impose constraints on the mereological complexity of these two arguments
and the homomorphism enforces compatibility between the lexemes and
context. This explains a wide range of distributional data in a very
general way, compatible with previous work on telicity and expandable to
other aspectual types (such as statives).
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
Back to the workshop homepage.
This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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