Events, Arguments, and Aspects: Topics in the Semantics of Verbs

384 Pages·2014·5.03 MB·English

by  Klaus Robering

Events, Arguments, and Aspects
Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS)
This series has been established as a companion series to the periodical
Studies in Language.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs
Editors
Werner Abraham Elly van Gelderen
University of Vienna / Arizona State University
University of Munich
Editorial Board
Bernard Comrie Christian Lehmann
Max Planck Institute, Leipzig University of Erfurt
and University of California, Santa Barbara
Marianne Mithun
William Croft University of California, Santa Barbara
University of New Mexico
Heiko Narrog
Östen Dahl Tohuku University
University of Stockholm
Johanna L. Wood
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal University of Aarhus
University of Cologne
Debra Ziegeler
Ekkehard König University of Paris III
Free University of Berlin
Volume 152
Events, Arguments, and Aspects. Topics in the Semantics of Verbs
Edited by Klaus Robering
Events, Arguments, and Aspects
Topics in the Semantics of Verbs
Edited by
Klaus Robering
University of Southern Denmark
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Events, Arguments, and Aspects : Topics in the Semantics of Verbs / Edited by Klaus
Robering.
p. cm. (Studies in Language Companion Series, issn 0165-7763 ; v. 152)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Semantics, Comparative. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general--Verb. 3. Grammar,
Comparative and general--Aspect. 4. Categorial grammar. I. Robering, Klaus,
editor of compilation.
P325.5.C6E84 2014
415’.6--dc23 2013049289
isbn 978 90 272 5917 2 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7062 7 (Eb)
© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Events, arguments, and aspects 1
Klaus Robering
Part I. Verb meaning and argument structure
1. Ergativity and the object-oriented representation of verb meaning 65
Anton Benz
2. Grammatical metaphors and there-insertion in Danish 89
Anne Bjerre and Tavs Bjerre
3. Abstract objects of verbs 115
Klaus Robering
4. Object-orientation and the semantics of verbs 159
Andrea C. Schalley
Part II. Aspect and aktionsart
5. Aspectual coercion and eventuality structure 189
Johannes Dölling
6. Phases in verbal semantics 227
Volkmar Engerer
7. How light are aspectual meanings? A study of the relation between
light verbs and lexical aspects in Ukrainian 261
Natalia Kotsyba
8. The ‘say, do’ verb in Nyulnyul, Warrwa, and other Nyulnyulan
languages is monosemic 301
William B. McGregor
vi Events, Arguments, and Aspects Topics in the Semantics of Verbs
9. Predicate classes: A study in compositional semantics 329
Peter Oehl
Index of names 363
Index of objects 367
Preface
“Habent sua fata libelli”. The present collection’s fate (until now) has been this: In
2007 Volkmar Engerer, then working at the Danish National Library in Aarhus,
contacted me with the idea to use the technological possibilities o ered by the new
social media in order to collect a group of interested linguists for the production
ff
of a common book on some topics from semantics of interest for all participants.
His plan was to establish a blog which could be used as a discussion forum. This
should provide the final product with a much higher degree of coherence than is
ordinarily found in the common collections and proceedings arising from confer-
ences and workshops. The participants of the project would have the opportunity
to discuss with each other and to exchange ideas over a period much more exten-
sive than that o ered by even the longest conference. Blog-internal prepublication
of drafts would be possible and the participants could thus profit from detailed
ff
and in-depth comments from the co-participants. Furthermore, the blog should
comprise a wiki-component o ering information about semantic issues which the
participants could use during the writing process.
ff
All this sounded nice and I agreed. I proposed to Volkmar as a common topic
of the project the potential o ered by methods developed for the semantics of pro-
gramming language for the semantic description of natural languages. Volkmar
ff
refused this proposal as too technical and much too special and he wished some-
thing more central for the concerns of the working linguist. Since the verb, in
many grammatical theories, is conceived as the “center of the sentence”, I thought
that there could be nothing more central to linguists than verbal semantics; and
Volkmar agreed to this second proposal. He implemented a blog, participants for
the projects were invited, and the whole project started in spring 2008. The blog
was sustained for two years; and I fear that the activities on it have not been so
intense as Volkmar wished and expected. Nevertheless, all participants enjoyed
the experiment and decided to meet personally on a workshop which Volkmar
arranged at the National Library in Aarhus in October 2010. There we decided to
publish the final output of our experiment, and Volkmar and I received the honor-
able task to care for the publishing process. At the end of 2011, Volkmar moved
to Aalborg to start there a new job at the Royal School of Library and Information
Science. Because the new job required his whole commitment, Volkmar was no
viii Events, Arguments, and Aspects Topics in the Semantics of Verbs
longer able to participate in the editing work. So I took over the whole project
which unfortunately resulted in a further delay.
Nevertheless, I finally managed the task and I am glad to present the result
of the whole process, which the reader hopefully will enjoy. As a glance upon
the table of content will reveal, I have divided the volume up into two parts: one
concerned with argument structure, the other with issues concerning time, aspect,
and phases. The thematic overlap, however, is considerable; most articles deal with
topics from either part. In order to introduce the reader to the whole collection,
I have added an introduction which follows the general disposition of the entire
volume. The introduction provides maps of the two main topic areas and places
the individual contributions on these maps.
I am well aware that the complete form of the citation from the beginning of
this preface is “Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli”. The readers endowed with
more formal and technical capabilities and interests will be glad, I think, to rec-
ognize that there are some “remnants” (in the articles by Anton Benz and Andrea
Schalley and in my own) of my original proposal regarding the topic of the entire
project. Linguists who feel more at home with the careful and detailed description
of natural language phenomena will surely find their share, too.
Before a book can “have a fate” at all, it must “come into existence”, of course.
Many people deserve thanks for having contributed to this. First of all, Volkmar
Engerer should be mentioned: he started the entire project which resulted in
the present book with his splendid idea mentioned above. Then there are, of
course, the authors who deserve thanks not only for their contributions but also
for their unbelievable patience during a long and complicated editing process.
Furthermore, many thanks go to Elly van Gelderen and Werner Abraham, who
included the book in their series “Linguistics Today”. Werner Abraham was also
helpful with his hints and critical comments on a first draft of this volume. Finally,
I have to thank Kees Vaes from John Benjamins Publishing Company for accom-
panying the whole process as a friendly and helpful spirit and for insisting (at
several critical points) that it has to be brought to a happy conclusion.
Klaus Robering
Kolding, September 2013
Introduction
Events, arguments, and aspects
Klaus Robering
University of Southern Denmark
Kolding/Denmark
1. Two issues in the semantics of verbs
At the beginning of his De Interpretatione (Aristotle 1989), which has been a
starting point for both logic and linguistics in the Western World, Aristotle defines
two basic components of sentences: “names” and “verbs”. His criteria for this dis-
tinction are, as we would say today, semantic ones. Both types of linguistic items
are atomic in the sense that they are themselves significant but do not contain sig-
nificant parts. Hence they are minimal significant items. There are two properties
which distinguish the two types: (1st) Whereas nouns are “significant by conven-
tion, without time” (Aristotle 1989: 43, 16a 19), a verb “additionally signifies time”
(p. 44, 16b 6). (2nd) Furthermore, a verb “is a sign of things said of something else”
(p. 44, 16b 6). The second criterion obviously aims at the peculiarity of verbs that
they semantically operate upon their companion words within the sentence, i.e.,
that they have arguments. We are thus pleased to see here that Aristotle addresses
the two main topics of the present volume: the linguistic representation of temporal
matters on the one hand and argument structure on the other.
In the following I want to provide an introduction to the individual contribu-
tions to the present collection. In this I follow the twofold thematic distinction just
mentioned. I shall first deal with the topic of argument structure and then continue
with the issue of time and aspect. Each of the two parts of the introduction starts
with a general exposition of the subject area including a brief survey of its history.
This is followed then by a brief overview of those articles of the present volume
which deal with issues from the respective area. Some articles deal with topics from
both areas;1 they will thus be dealt with in both parts of this introduction.
1. Indeed, almost all articles do this. My own contribution is the only one which exclusively
deals with argument structure and ignores time and aspect.