Events in natural language

Course author

Sergei Tatevosov

Professor, Lomonosov Moscow State University

 

Course annotation

Events constitute the most significant part of human experience. Time and things that exist in time reveal themselves to us through events that develop, happen, occur, and most significantly, are talked about. The goal of this seminar is to give a comprehensive, in-depth perspective on recent advances in the studies of how events are manifested in natural language. We will start by introducing  the basic tool that semanticists use to analyze events, the (Neo-)Davidsonian event semantics. We will see how this tool is applied to  a number of natural language phenomena, including grammatical (viewpoint) aspect, lexical aspect (Aktionsart), event plurality, and aspectual composition. We will present the crosslinguistic variation in the domain drawing data from genetically unrelated languages including Germanic, Slavic, Turkic, Uralic and North-Caucasian. We will introduce the main ideas which appeared in the literature as to the internal structure and interpretation of natural language event predicates: predicate decomposition, subevental content of complex event descriptions, semantic relations between events, issues of causation. We will discuss intricate interactions between event structure and argument structure, with special attention to operations that simultaneously affect both, such as causativization and anticausativization.