Form-Independent Meaning Representation for Eventualities

Linguists and philosophers since Aristotle have attempted to reduce natural language semantics in general, and the semantics of eventualities in particular, to a ‘language of mind’, expressed in terms of various collections of underlying language-independent primitive concepts. While such systems have proved insightful enough to suggest that such a universal conceptual representation is in some sense psychologically real, the primitive relations proposed, based on oppositions like agent-patient, event-state, etc., have remained incompletely convincing. This chapter proposes that the primitive concepts of the language of mind are ‘hidden’, or latent, and must be discovered automatically by detecting consistent patterns of entailment in the vast amounts of text that are made available by the internet using automatic syntactic parsers and machine learning to mine a form- and language-independent semantic representation language for natural language semantics. The representations involved combine a distributional representation of ambiguity with a language of logical form.

Adjectives and Event Structure

This chapter investigates the relationship between adjectives and event structure by looking at properties of deverbal adjectives and deadjectival verbs. Although simple adjectives are not eventive, they nevertheless play an important role in matters of event structure, both in the way that they influence the eventive properties of verbs that they are derivationally related to, and in the way that an understanding of the scalar properties of adjectival meaning informs theorizing about eventive meanings. Although often considered in isolation, we show that adjectival gradability and verbal aspect are intimately related scalar phenomena. The structural properties of an adjectival scale determine the aspectual class of a derived event predicate. Similarly, the aspectual structure of a verb phrase constrains the scale structure of an adjectival participle. Our discussion focuses primarily on degree-based approaches to these phenomena, but we also consider alternative approaches based in a more articulated ontology for states.

Introduction

This introduction summarizes the major pieces of research that laid the foundations for the current field of event structure. It discusses three leading ideas from the 1950s and 1960s: (1) many sentences have a covert event argument (Davidson); (2) event descriptions can be divided into classes according to their aspectual properties (Vendler); (3) apparently lexical meaning is partly a product of compositional processes involving operators like CAUSE and BECOME (Lakoff, McCawley). These ideas became intertwined during the 1970s–90s, laying out the terrain for today’s event-structural research. This chapter also summarizes the contents of the handbook, and relationships between the chapters.

Force Dynamics

This chapter examines the semantics of force dynamics, from its cognitive linguistic origins to recent formal approaches. Force dynamics proves to be a fruitful addition to the ontology, allowing natural representations of the distinction between energy and change, interactions within and between events, and ceteris paribus effects, among other phenomena. This makes force dynamics useful, perhaps even indispensable, for a full understanding of event structure and related domains such as aspect, modality, and inference. A debate is just getting underway on how to formally represent forces in ways that are faithful to morphosyntax, compositional semantics, and conceptual plausibility. It may be that lexical-conceptual representations of forces differ from functional (grammaticalized) representations of forces.

Event Kinds

This chapter provides an overview of different empirical domains for which it has been argued to be useful to add event kinds (or types) to the ontology, in addition to event tokens. Direct parallels are drawn to the motivation that have led to positing kinds in the nominal domain, such as the idea that elements like so (English such) is a kind anaphora and that modification derives subkinds, which is related to the general hierarchical organization of kinds found in both domains, or the observation that modified event kinds have to be well-established, a constraint that is also found with kind reference by singular definite noun phrases.

Event Structure and Syntax

This chapter examines the syntactic decompositional view of event structure. On this view, the event is composed of distinct syntactic heads that correspond to its meaning ingredients. The chapter critically reviews the various arguments presented in the literature for a decompositional analysis of pairs of verbs that differ roughly in that one of them has one more argument than the other. It focuses on the inchoative alternation, comparing it to the Japanese and Hungarian causative alternations. The chapter shows that these alternations differ from one another in important respects, and only the Japanese causative alternation deserves a syntactic decompositional treatment. The chapter thus contributes a critical evaluation of the scope and limitations of syntactic representations of lexical decomposition.

Event Structure without naïve Physics

What is the real nature of the aspectual division between perfective and imperfective as revealed by the well-known in/for-test? The answer is founded on the idea that this division between completion and incompletion mirrors our cognitive capacity to shift between discreteness and continuity as expressed in the number systems N and R. To get at the real contribution of a verb to aspectual information, the first step is to determine the basic atemporal building block making a tenseless verb stative or non-stative. For this, verbhood is to be understood aspectually in a very strict way abstracting from the contribution of arguments. It follows that one has to get ‘below’ event structure in order to see why the in/for-test works as it turns out to do (or in some cases not).

Events and States

Hidden event arguments, as introduced by Davidson (1967), have proven to be of significant benefit in explaining numerous combinatorial and inferential properties of natural language expressions, such that they show up virtually everywhere in present-day assumptions about linguistic structure. The chapter reviews current assumptions concerning the ontological properties of events and states and evaluates different approaches to a narrow or broad understanding of Davidsonian eventualities. A closer look into a variety of stative expressions reveals substantial differences with respect to a series of linguistic diagnostics that point towards deeper ontological differences. Acknowledging these differences leads to a differentiation of the cover notion of states into three separate ontological categories: D-states, K-states, and tropes. Once these three stative categories are disentangled and receive their proper place in the ontological universe, this not only allows the observed linguistic behavior to be accounted for, but it also sharpens our understanding of Davidsonian eventualities.

Event Structure and Verbal Decomposition

This chapter explores the relationship between constrained semantic representations of events, and structured syntactic representations that express them. I show that these representations track each other systematically, and that argument structure generalizations emerge in lock-step with these structures. I therefore propose a system in which those generalizations follow from the following general principles of structural interpretation: (i) embedding corresponds to the cause/leads to relation; (ii) each subevental structure is related potentially to a participant NP; (iii) event-recursion is limited to structures with at most one dynamic predication per event phase. The maximal subevental structure consists of a stative predication embedding a dynamic one, and the dynamic one in turn embedding a stative one. This structure and its proper subsets exhaust the event types built by the grammar. These principles ensure the relative prominence of the different argument positions as well as specific entailments for the different positions.

Neodavidsonianism in Semantics and Syntax

This chapter discusses the impact and development of Donald Davidson’s original proposal that there is an event variable in the logical forms that encode meaning in natural languages. Originally, Davidson was concerned with adjuncts and their entailments, but this chapter demonstrates how these insights were extended to apply to thematic arguments. It is argued that there is a family of Neodavidsonian proposals that all have in common that they argue for Neodavidsonian logical forms. However, they differ substantially in how they derive these logical forms, notably in what assumptions they make concerning the syntactic structure that serves as an input to the semantic interpretation. The chapter provides an overview of some of the different approaches, closing by defending a view that can be viewed as a natural consequence of the original insight due to Davidson: not only event predicates, but also argument predicates are linked together by way of conjunction.