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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
Friday, May 21, 3:30pm in 460-126:
Macro-events: Principles of Event Encoding at
the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Jürgen Bohnemeyer (SUNY Buffalo)
This presentation examines the principles that govern the encoding of
complex events at the syntax-semantics interface ('correspondence rules',
in the parlance of Jackendoff 1997). The focus will be on the domain of
complex motion events, i.e., events that involve sequences of location
changes of a single Figure with respect to multiple Grounds (in the
terminology of Talmy 2000). Data will be drawn from research by the
author and his colleagues at the Event Representation project of the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
As a starting point for meaningful generalizations about the mapping of
semantic/conceptual event representations into syntax, the macro-event
property (MEP) is proposed (borrowing the term 'macro-event' from Talmy
2000). The MEP applies to constructions that "package" the parts of an
event so tightly as to not permit individual access by time-positional
operators (adverbials, tenses, etc.). Consider the utterances in (1),
which could all serve as descriptions of the same perceived event:
(1) a. Floyd left Nijmegen at eight. He passed through Utrecht at nine
and reached
Amsterdam at ten.
b. *Floyd went from Nijmegen at eight to Amsterdam at ten via
Utrecht at nine.
c. In the morning, Floyd went from Nijmegen to Amsterdam via
Utrecht.
Assuming that events as intentional objects of cognitive representations
are individuated by the space-time regions they occupy, the subevents of
departure, passing, and arrival are individuated in (1a), but not in
(1c). Only time-positional adverbials that denote intervals accommodating
all subevents may combine with (1c). This is what is captured by saying
that (1c), but not (1a), has the MEP.
The MEP is formally defined in the framework of Krifka's (1998)
merological approach to event semantics. It is demonstrated with reference
to multi-verb constructions in a variety of languages that the MEP does
not necessarily apply to a particular type of syntactic projection (such
as the verb phrase or clause), and that it is difficult to identify a
single construction type to which the MEP applies
crosslinguistically. Where mismatches occur, the MEP is a better predictor
of form-to-meaning mapping properties than the type of syntactic
projection.
There is a surprising amount of crosslinguistic variation in how much
information about a motion event can be packaged into an expression that
has the MEP (for short, a 'macro-event expression' (MEE)). Yet, a number
of correspondence rules have been found to hold for MEEs in all languages
examined so far. One such rule requires biunique assignment of thematic
relations (Bresnan 1982, Chomsky 1981, Fillmore 1968) to arguments and
adjuncts within MEEs, including to Ground phrases in motion event
descriptions. That this principle appears to operate specifically on MEEs
confirms Carlson's (1984, 1998) hypothesis according to which biunique
linking is conceptually tied to the individuation criteria for
events. Time permitting, a variety of putative correspondence rules on
MEEs will be discussed, including one domain-specific constraint on motion
event descriptions, the 'Unique Vector Constraint' (Bohnemeyer 2003).
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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