Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation PDF
Preview Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation
Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation Language, Context, and Cognition Edited by Anita Steube Volume 5 w DE G Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation Edited by Johannes Dölling Tatjana Heyde-Zybatow Martin Schäfer w DE G Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York © Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Event structures in linguistic form and interpretation / edited by Johannes Dölling, Tatjana Heyde-Zybatow, Martin Schäfer, p. cm. — (Language, context, and cognition) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-019066-3 (alk. paper) 1. Grammar, Comparative and general — Syntax. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general — Verb phrase. 3. Semantics. I. Dölling, Johannes. II. Heyde-Zybatow, Tatjana, 1973— III. Schäfer, Mar- tin, 1975- P295.E96 2007 415—dc22 2007005990 ISBN 978-3-11-019066-3 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen Contents Introduction IX Section I: Event Structure and Syntactic Construction Patients in Igbo and Mandarin 3 Alexander Williams Event decomposition and the syntax and semantics of durative phrases in Chinese 31 Jo-wang Lin Syntactic decomposition of events in Korean and Standard Indonesian 55 Minjeong Son and Peter Cole Section II: Event Structure and Modification Unifying illegally 81 Kyle Rawlins Adverbial modification of adjectives: Evaluatives and a little beyond 103 Marcin Morzycki The structure of criterion predicates 127 Kjell Johan Sceb0 Reference to embedded eventualities 149 Markus Egg Section III: Event Structure and Situation Aspect Two puzzles for a theory of lexical aspect: Semelfactives and degree achievements 175 Susan Rothstein The notion of 'path' in aspectual composition: Evidence from Japanese 199 Eri Tanaka VI Contents Reflexive intransitives in Spanish and event semantics 223 Eric McCready and Chiyo Nishida Scalar complexity and the structure of events 245 John Beavers Section IV: Event Structure and Plurality On the plurality of verbs 269 Angelika Kratzer Event quantification and distributivity 301 Kimiko Nakanishi The event structure of irreducibly symmetric reciprocals 327 Alexis Dimitriadis Existential readings for bare plurals in object position 355 Sheila Glasbey Section V: Event Structure and Temporal Location Tense and adverbial quantification 389 Cornelia Endriss and Stefan Hinterwimmer Phase structure and quantification 413 Marko Malink Cohesion in temporal context: The role of aspectual adverbs 435 Alice G.B. ter Meulen Mandarin sentential -le, perfect and English already 447 Hooi Ling Soh and Meijia Gao Section VI: Event Structure and Natural Language Ontology The lower part of event ontology 477 Regine Eckardt Verbs of creation 493 Christopher Piñón Contents VII Portraits of the Authors 523 Index 527 Introduction This volume comprises a selection of papers presented at the workshop "Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation", which took place at the Uni- versity of Leipzig in March 17-19, 2004. The workshop was hosted by the research project "Event Structures: Grammatical and Conceptual Components of Utterance Interpretation" at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Leipzig. The central topic to be addressed was how conceptual information on event structure is encoded in linguistic expressions and how such informa- tion can be reconstructed from utterances. Answers to these questions essen- tially contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between lexical semantics, syntactic structure, pragmatic inference, and world knowledge in a broader cognitive perspective. Among the many collections on event-based semantics and syntax appear- ing over the last ten years (e.g. Rothstein, 1998; Tenny and Pustejovsky, 2000; Higginbotham, Pianesi and Varzi, 2000; Lang, Maienborn and Fabricius- Hansen, 2003; Austin, Engelberg and Rauh, 2004; Maienborn and Wöllstein, 2005; and Verkuyl, de Swart and van Hout, 2005), this volume adopts a decid- edly applied attitude in that the existence of Davidsonian event arguments is taken as given and that problems of the fundamental methodology are of minor concern. Instead, it demonstrates how the idea of event structure can be suc- cessfully applied to a wide range of empirical problems in an increasing num- ber of languages. Thus, the topic is discussed not only on the basis of English and German but, among others, of Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indo- nesian, and Igbo as well. The contributed papers fall into several broad classes - accounting for event structure in connection with syntactic construction, modification, situation aspect, plurality, temporal location, and natural language ontology. Accord- ingly, the volume is organized into six sections. Section I: Event Structure and Syntactic Construction The assumption of an event-related framework in research on verb meaning raises important questions for the analysis of the syntax/semantics interface. While it is uncontroversial that event structure is to some degree reflected in syntactic structure, there is an ongoing discussion about the sort of verbal in- formation that should play a role in the syntactic derivation. Two different strategies of meaning decomposition, which can be traced back to the Genera-
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