This volume addresses the problem of how language expresses conceptual information on event structures and how such information can be reconstructed in the interpretation process. The papers present important new insights into recent semantic and syntactic research on the topic. The volume deals with the following problems in detail: event structure and syntactic construction, event structure and modification, event structure and plurality, event structure and temporal relation, event structure and situation aspect, and event structure and language ontology. Importantly, the topic is discussed not only on the basis of English and German but on the basis of other languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and Igbo as well. This volume thus provides solid evidence towards clarifying the empirical use of event based analyses.

This book focuses on the linguistic representation of temporality in the verbal domain and its interaction with the syntax and semantics of verbs, arguments, and modifiers. Leading scholars explore the division of labour between syntax, compositional semantics, and lexical semantics in the encoding of event structure, encompassing event participants and the temporal properties associated with events. They examine the interface between event structure and the systems with which it interacts, including the interface between event structure and the syntactic realization of arguments and modifiers. Deploying a variety of frameworks and theoretical perspectives they consider central issues and questions in the field, among them whether argument-structure is specified in the lexical entries of verbs or syntactically constructed so that syntactic position determines thematic status; whether the hierarchical structure evidenced in argument structure find parallels in sign language; should the relation between members of an alternation pair, such as the causative-inchoative alternation, be understood lexically or derivationally; and the role of syntactic category in determining the configuration of argument structure.

This handbook deals with research into the nature of events, and how we use language to describe events. The study of event structure over the past 60 years has been one of the most successful areas of lexical semantics, uniting insights from morphology and syntax, lexical and compositional semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence to develop insightful theories of events and event descriptions. This volume provides accessible introductions to major topics and ongoing debates in event structure research, exploring what events are, how we perceive them, how we reason with them, and the role they play in the organization of grammar and discourse. The chapters are divided into four parts: the first covers metaphysical issues related to events; the second is concerned with the relationship between event structure and grammar; the third is a series of crosslinguistic case studies; and the fourth deals with links to cognitive science and artificial intelligence more broadly. The book is strongly interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science, and will appeal to a wide range of researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

This book focuses on the linguistic representation of temporality in the verbal domain and its interaction with the syntax and semantics of verbs, arguments, and modifiers. Leading scholars explore the division of labour between syntax, compositional semantics, and lexical semantics in the encoding of event structure, encompassing event participants and the temporal properties associated with events. They examine the interface between event structure and the systems with which it interacts, including the interface between event structure and the syntactic realization of arguments and modifiers. Deploying a variety of frameworks and theoretical perspectives they consider central issues and questions in the field, among them whether argument-structure is specified in the lexical entries of verbs or syntactically constructed so that syntactic position determines thematic status; whether the hierarchical structure evidenced in argument structure find parallels in sign language; should the relation between members of an alternation pair, such as the causative-inchoative alternation, be understood lexically or derivationally; and the role of syntactic category in determining the configuration of argument structure.

The verb has often been considered the 'center' of the sentence and has hence always attracted the special attention of the linguist. The present volume collects novel approaches to two classical topics within verbal semantics, namely argument structure and the treatment of time and aspect. The linguistic material covered comes from a broad spectrum of languages including English, German, Danish, Ukrainian, and Australian aboriginal languages; and methods from both cognitive and formal semantics are applied in the analyses presented here. Some of the authors use a variety of event semantics in order to analyze argument structure and aspect whereas others employ ideas coming from object-oriented programming in order to achieve new insights into the way how verbs select their arguments and how events are classified into different types. Both kinds of methods are also used to give accounts of dynamical aspects of semantic interpretation such as coercion and type shifting.

This detailed, perceptive addition to the linguistics literature analyzes the semantic components of event predicates, exploring their fine-grained elements as well as their agency in linguistic processing. The papers go beyond pure semantics to consider their varying influences of event predicates on argument structure, aspect, scalarity, and event structure. The volume shows how advances in the linguistic theory of event predicates, which have spawned Davidsonian and neo-Davidsonian notions of event arguments, in addition to ‘event structure’ frameworks and mereological models for the eventuality domain, have sidelined research on specific sets of entailments that support a typology of event predicates. Addressing this imbalance in the literature, the work also presents evidence indicating a more complex role for scalar structures than currently assumed. It will enrich the work of semanticists, psycholinguists, and syntacticians with a decompositional approach to verb phrase structure.

This book investigates different types of verb-PP combinations and examines the types of meanings which arise when the argument structure of the PP fuses with the verbal argument structure. Focussing mainly on data from Norwegian, the book investigates three different empirical domains of PP-VP combinations and concludes that the arising interpretations result from a combination of the fine-grained structure of the PP, the structure of the verb phrase, and the different modes of combination. The book sheds new light on the syntax-semantics interplay while adding new insight about the properties of the category P in Norwegian. The book also contributes to the debate between Lexicalism and Constructionism, and it concludes that a moderate Constructionist model with a fine-grained syntactic structure determining interpretation is best equipped to handle the enormous flexibility of verb-prepositional phrase combinations of the types explored.