In this paper I examine the aspectual behavior of dynamic predicates, i.e. predicates that involve some “change ” or potential change in one participant, including change-of-state, motion, and consumption/destruction predicates. I focus on the factors governing durativity in dynamic predicates, which I

Most current studies of aspect assume the existence of the four Vendler classes: states, activities, achievements and accomplishments. Despite the fact that other classifications have been offered, (for example, those in Mourelatos 1978, Bach 1981, and Carlson 1981) none has achieved the status of the Vendler classification. Often, linguists take these classes to be a linguistic fact, and then attempt to come up with theories which explain their existence and their properties, usually by offering basic elements of meaning and modes of composition that together produce just these four aspectual classes. One question which arises in the context of this enterprise is what aspectual classes are classes of. While the title of Vendler’s (1957) paper (“Verbs and Times”) leads one to assume that that Vendler was classifying verbs, he seemed to have been aware that he was really classifying larger linguistic units. The properties which define the Vendler classes are dynamicity, duration and telicity, at least some of which are not determined once and for all at the lexical level, but, rather, at the VP level, as a result of aspectual composition (Dowty 1979, Krifka 1992, 1998, Verkuyl 1989, among others). Thus, one

English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface. The present paper argues that a family of related constructions is required to account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence is predic ted by general principles of argument linking; the aspectual structure of the sentence is determined by the aspectual structure of the constructional subevent, which is in turn predictable from general principles correlating event structure with change, extension, motion, and paths. Finally, the semantics and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities for temporal relations between the two subevents. At the same time that these generalizations clearly exist, there is also a great deal of idiosyncrasy involved in resultatives. Many idiosyncratic instances and small subclasses of the construction must be learned and stored individually. The account serves to justify aspects of what we share in our overall vision of grammar, what we might call the "constructional" view. To the extent that our treatment of the resultative can be stated only within the constructional view, it serves as evidence for this view as a whole. 1. A constructional view of grammar For fifteen years, the English resultative construction has been a focus of research on the syntaxsemantics interface. Each of us has made proposals about the resultative (Goldberg 1991; Goldberg 1995; Jackendoff 1997a; Jackendoff 1990) proposals that share a certain family resemblance. The present paper is an attempt to consolidate what our approaches have in common and to add some new wrinkles to our common understanding. Our larger purpose is ...

Whether particular arguments are overtly realized in languages like English is not random. A number of researchers have put forward sweeping generalizations in order to capture certain general tendencies. In this paper, however, it is argued that these analyses underestimate the role of constructions, detailed lexical semantics and discourse factors. Given sufficient attention to these factors, the general tendencies, as well as productive classes of systematic exceptions, follow without additional grammatical stipulation. 1.

This work investigates children’s early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., big, long), maximum standard absolute (e.g., full, straight), and minimum standard absolute (e.g., spotted, bumpy) GAs in the way that the standard of comparison is set and how it interacts with the discourse context. I then ask if adverbs enable infants to learn these differences. In a corpus analysis, I demonstrate that statistically significant patterns of adverbial modification are available to the language learner: restricted adverbs (e.g., completely) are more likely than non-restricted adverbs (e.g., very) to select for maximal GAs with bounded scales. Non-maximal GAs, which are more likely to be modified by adverbs in general, are more likely to be modified by a narrower range, predominantly composed of intensifiers (e.g., very). I then ask if language learners recruit this information when learning new adjectives. In a word learning task employing the preferential looking paradigm, I demonstrate that 30-month-olds use adverbial modifiers they are not necessarily producing to assign an interpretation to novel adjectives. Adjectives modified by completely are assigned an

Abstract not found

this paper, we argue that the impact of traditionally recognized aspectual properties --- particularly the notions just cited --- on argument expression has been overestimated (see also Reinhart 2000). Notions such as telicity have been We thank audiences at the Round Table on the Syntax of Tense and Aspect for their questions and comments. This work was supported in part by US NSF Grant SBC-0096036 to Levin and by Israel Science Foundation Grant 832-00 to Rappaport Hovav

This paper explores the architecture of the syntax/semantics interface. Many recent theories of lexical meaning assume that argument realization is largely dependent on underlying subevent structure. However, I show that subevent structure is not sufficient to capture certain generalizations about argument realization, focusing on the domain of argument/oblique alternations, where a single argument of a verb can be realized either as a direct or oblique argument. I suggest that for these alternations the relevant semantic property is strength of truth conditions: all else being equal an argument realized as a direct argument in such an alternation will have a monotonically stronger set of truth conditions imposed on it than when it is realized as an oblique. I offer an analysis of object/oblique alternations in particular, suggesting that the weakening truth conditions in a range of such alternations follows from a single Affectedness Hierarchy that captures increasingly more general degrees of affectedness for patient arguments. I show that similar contrasts can be found with indirec object/oblique and subject/oblique alternations as well, on different semantic hierarchies. I conclude by suggesting a theory of weakening truth conditions is not incompatible with subevent semantic analyses of verb meaning, and in fact the two can augment one another. ∗ This paper is based on my dissertation (Beavers 2006), though of course many details are left aside in this presentation.

Abstract not found

Affectedness (a change in an event participant) has been implicated in argument realization, lexical aspect, transitivity, and various syntactic operations. However, it is rarely given a precise, independently-motivated definition. Rather, it is usually defined either intuitively or diacritically, or reduced to the properties it is meant to explain, especially lexical aspect. In this paper I provide a semantic definition of affectedness as a relationship between an argument and a property scale (following recent work by Beavers 2008 and Kennedy and Levin 2008). I justify this analysis by re-examining some of the empirical evidence for affectedness, and argue that it is not reducible to lexical aspect, but is tightly correlated to it in a way that motivates a definition involving two mutually-interdependent participants. This model also gives us a precise way to define the pervasive notion of degrees of affectedness, in terms of monotonically strengthened truth conditions about the result state along what I call the Affectedness Hierarchy. This in turn captures important subset relations that dynamic predicates stand in regarding affectedness and aspectual diagnostics. I also show how this definition of affectedness brings together many of the above phenomena under a single, unified approach.