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Valency and aspectuality : syntactic and semantic motivation for the notion of "change of state"
(1994)
Certain semantic properties of verbs have syntactic consequences in that they restrict the ability of the verb to occur in particular constructions. It will be argued that such semantic properties may not be introduced for syntactic purposes alone, but that the semantic nature and relevance of these properties has to be proved. In the following sections it will be shown which semantic verbal properties have to be assumed to capture the restrictions for the occurrence of a certain syntactic pattern in German, the so-called a construction These same properties will also turn out to be necessary for the explanation of semantic phenomena like sentential aspect. Finally, the meaning of the introduced notions and their theoretical status will be discussed.
Was es heißt, "in sechs Monaten zu promovieren"! Unergative Accomplishments in der Aspektkomposition
(1997)
Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, unter welchen Bedingungen intransitive, unergative Verben in Accomplishments auftreten. Den Überlegungen liegt das im Anhang enthaltene Korpus von Beispielen zugrunde, das solche Sätze enthält wie sie frühstückte in fünf Minuten, er räumte in wenigen Minuten auf oder sie duschte in zehn Minuten. Solche unergativen Accomplishments sind meines Wissens in der Literatur zu aspektuellen Klassen und Aspektkomposition bisher nicht beschrieben oder erklärt worden. Die Verben gehören einer Vielfalt von lexikalischen Gruppen an, für deren aspektuelles Verhalten jeweils unterschiedliche Erklärungen erforderlich sind, die zum Teil noch sehr tentativen Charakter haben. Ausgangspunkt dieser Überlegungen ist KRIFKAs Theorie zur Aspektkomposition. Ich werde versuchen, KRIFKAs (1989a, 1989b) Grundideen der Aspektkomposition in etwas modifizierter Form zu bestätigen und die Erklärungen für den Accomplishment-Status der Unergativa in einer reichen Repräsentation lexikalisch-semantischer Eigenschaften von Verben zu suchen.
Lexical-semantic theories often suffer from the imprecision of the concepts they employ in their representations. This leads to a considerable decrease in empirical strength by inviting circular argumentation. A demonstration of how to go about overcoming such shortcomings will be carried out, using the lexical semantic concept of "punctuality" as an example. Firstly, I will argue that the distinction between punctuality and durativity plays a crucial role for the explanation of a wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. Secondly, I will discuss methodological issues involved in arriving at a more precise definition of punctuality and, finally, the notion of "punctuality" will be given an interpretation on the basis of extensive consultation of research on cognitive time concepts.
Whether verbs have to be marked as punctual vs. durative has been a controversial issue from the very beginnings of research on aktionsarten in the last century right on up to modern theories of aspectual classes and aspect composition. Debates about the linguistic necessity of this distinction have often been accompanied by the question of what it means for a verb to be temporally punctual. In this paper I will, firstly, sketch the history of research on the punctual-durative distinction and present several linguistic arguments in its favor. Secondly, I will show how this distinction is captured in an eventstructure- based approach to lexical semantics. Thirdly, I will discuss the extent to which a precise definition of the notions used in lexical
representations helps avoid circular argumentation in lexical semantics. Finally, I will demonstrate how this can be done for the notion of ‘punctuality’ by clarifying the logical type of this predicate and relating it to central cognitive time concepts.
The "imperfective-paradox" paradox and other problems with the semantics of the progressive aspect
(2000)
This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, of which it has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account. 1 A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive that integrates concepts of nonnality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 1 I will present several problems connected with the semantics of the progressive that are crucial for shaping its truth conditions. Several solutions to these problems that have been suggested in the literature will be discussed. 2 In section 2 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 2.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 2.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 2.3, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
Semantic theories based on predicate-argument structures have always acknowledged that lexical information associated with verbs is the basic source for the rudimentary semantic structure of sentences. The central role of verbs in sentence structure has become a major insight of modern syntactic theories since the lexical turn in linguistics, too. As a result of this development there has been an increasing interest in theories on the lexical representation of verbs. This paper will briefly review prevailing theories on verb semantics (section 1), showing that they can capture only a part of the wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena dependent on verb meaning. For several of these phenomena (section 2) it will turn out that a theory based on highly structured events is more suitable for representing verb meaning. This theory is based on the idea that verbs refer to events that consist of several subevents which are temporally related, classified according to their duration, and whose event participants are connected to some but not necessarily all subevents by semantic relations (section 3).
The paper argues that lexical-semantic representations within event semantics often suffer from a severe lack of empirical content. To demonstrate this, some main tenets of truth conditional semantics and its consequences for the lexical-semantic metalanguage are discussed. It will be shown that lexical semantic meaning postulates have to be improved in the following ways: i) the formulation of empirically verifiable definitions of the metalinguistic predicates, ii) the clarification of the logical type of these predicates, iii) the establishment of a procedure by which the predication can be verified, iv) the careful observation of the semantics of the logical operators, and v) the establishment of identity criteria for the basic ontological sorts. Furthermore, the strategies many lexical-semantic theories develop in order to immunize themselves against empirical falsification will be identified in several examples. Finally, it will be argued that an empircally sound lexical-semantic theory within truth-conditional event semantics has to be based on empirical research in cognitive science