Event structure cross-linguistically
National Research University Higher School of Economics & University of California, Berkeley
Aktionsart categories have major implications for verbal semantics and morphology, the meanings of TAM categories, and various syntactic phenomena, yet they have received relatively little cross-linguistic work – probably because they are cross-linguistically intractable. They vary greatly from language to language; in any one language they are numerous and/or variable; often they are verb-specific or at least highly sensitive to verb semantics; the categories or classes are often covert; and approaches to best descriptive practice vary. And there is still no comprehensive description of aktionsart for any one language, let alone enough languages to support a typology. Here I propose an approach that works. It is based on the very broad recurrent categories that are generic to language-specific aktionsart categories and can generally be determined from bilingual dictionaries or simple elicitation procedures. These are the notions of event structure which are fundamental to most formal semantics and generative lexical work: the state or activity or phase and the change of state or transition. For the corresponding predicate classes I use the terms continuous vs. bounded, a deliberate attempt not to coincide with any commonly used terminology for aktionsart or aspect classes. This talk describes the semantics of the opposition for a number of different predicate types. The worldwide distribution of event-structure basic types is partly similar to other complex properties that form large-scale east-west clines, but less smooth, suggesting either that languages change rapidly and local idiosyncratic clusters form, or that event-structure type is very stable and has not yet fully adjusted to macroareal pressures.
semantics and morphology, the meanings of TAM categories, and various
syntactic phenomena, yet they have received relatively little
cross-linguistic work – probably because they are
cross-linguistically intractable. They vary greatly from language to
language; in any one language they are numerous and/or variable; often
they are verb-specific or at least highly sensitive to verb semantics;
the categories or classes are often covert; and approaches to best
descriptive practice vary. And there is still no comprehensive
description of aktionsart for any one language, let alone enough
languages to support a typology. Here I propose an approach that
works. It is based on the very broad recurrent categories that are
generic to language-specific aktionsart categories and can generally
be determined from bilingual dictionaries or simple elicitation
procedures. These are the notions of event structure which are
fundamental to most formal semantics and generative lexical work: the
state or activity or phase and the change of state or transition.
For the corresponding predicate classes I use the terms continuous vs.
bounded, a deliberate attempt not to coincide with any commonly used
terminology for aktionsart or aspect classes. This talk describes the
semantics of the opposition for a number of different predicate types.
The worldwide distribution of event-structure basic types is partly
similar to other complex properties that form large-scale east-west
clines, but less smooth, suggesting either that languages change
rapidly and local idiosyncratic clusters form, or that event-structure
type is very stable and has not yet fully adjusted to macroareal
pressures.