Events and Predication

Events and Predication
Author: Montserrat Sanz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2000-10-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902728444X

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Studies on the syntactic consequences of event type in languages have shown that Aktionsart plays a role in Universal Grammar. This book contributes to the exploration of the syntax/semantics interface by presenting a thorough comparison of event and predicate types in English and Spanish. The mapping between event and syntactic predicate types, including detransitives, is given a minimalist account based on the functional categories that embed event features and on a careful analysis of the features checked by objects. As the book delves into the theoretical issue of how parameters are characterized, it presents the most comprehensive account to date of event type phenomena in Spanish, an innovative analysis of the clitic SE and a re-definition of unaccusativity. The theory is then applied to the ongoing issues in the sentence processing literature. A proposal is made for an update of the current data in light of these latest linguistic discoveries.

Events and Predication

Events and Predication
Author: Montserrat Sanz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 902723714X

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Studies on the syntactic consequences of event type in languages have shown that "Aktionsart" plays a role in Universal Grammar. This book contributes to the exploration of the syntax/semantics interface by presenting a thorough comparison of event and predicate types in English and Spanish. The mapping between event and syntactic predicate types, including detransitives, is given a minimalist account based on the functional categories that embed event features and on a careful analysis of the features checked by objects. As the book delves into the theoretical issue of how parameters are characterized, it presents the most comprehensive account to date of event type phenomena in Spanish, an innovative analysis of the clitic "SE" and a re-definition of unaccusativity. The theory is then applied to the ongoing issues in the sentence processing literature. A proposal is made for an update of the current data in light of these latest linguistic discoveries.

Truth and Predication

Truth and Predication
Author: Donald Davidson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2009-07
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9780674030220

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This brief book takes readers to the very heart of what it is that philosophy can do well. Completed shortly before Donald Davidson's death at 85, Truth and Predication brings full circle a journey moving from the insights of Plato and Aristotle to the problems of contemporary philosophy. In particular, Davidson, countering many of his contemporaries, argues that the concept of truth is not ambiguous, and that we need an effective theory of truth in order to live well. Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar; in the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life--such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language use--how we connect noun to verb. This is a problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and Davidson draws on their thinking to show how an understanding of linguistic behavior is critical to the formulating of a workable concept of truth. Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty. Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.

Structuring Events

Structuring Events
Author: Susan Rothstein
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0470759100

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Structuring Events presents a novel semantic theory of lexical aspect for anyone interested in the study of verb meanings. Provides an introduction to aspectual classes and aspectual distinctions. Utilizes case studies to present a novel semantic theory of lexical aspect and compare it with alternative theories. Useful for students and scholars in semantics and syntax as well as the neighboring fields of pragmatics and philosophy of language.

Adverbs, Events, and Other Things

Adverbs, Events, and Other Things
Author: Regine Eckardt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2013-02-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 311091378X

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"Adverbs, Events, and Other Things" treats issues in the semantics of manner adverbs. Part I takes up the Davidsonian claim that manner adverbs are predicates of events. The book investigates the subtle interplay of event individuation and various kinds of event modification and claims that manner adverbs play a core rôle in singling out both simple and complex events. Part II of the book is devoted to word order phenomena involving manner adverbs in German. Presenting a general theory of predication structure for German sentences, the author shows how the position of manner adverbs - in interplay with other factors - determines the division of an utterance into topic and comment. She thereby gives semantic evidence in favour of the claim that manner adverbs in German have a syntactic base position.

Plurals and Events

Plurals and Events
Author: Barry Schein
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 1993
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780262193344

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Barry Schein proposes combining a second-order treatment of plurals with Donald Davidson's suggestion that there are positions for reference to events in ordinary predicates in order to account for several of the more puzzling features of plurals without invoking plural objects, with its attendant metaphysics, and also provide an absolute truth-theoretic characterization of the semantics of sentences with plurals in them. How do we make sense of sentences with plural noun phrases in them? In Plurals and Events, Barry Schein proposes combining a second-order treatment of plurals with Donald Davidson's suggestion that there are positions for reference to events in ordinary predicates in order to account for several of the more puzzling features of plurals without invoking plural objects, with its attendant metaphysics, and also provide an absolute truth-theoretic characterization of the semantics of sentences with plurals in them. Schein's highly original argument should have significant impact on how natural-language semantics is done, with repercussions for philosophy and logic. The book opens with foundational arguments that the logical language should have four major features: reduction to singular predication via a Davidsonian logical form, amereology of events, a logical syntax that allows the constituents of a Davidsonian analysis to be predicated of distinct events and separated from one another by other logical elements, and descriptive anaphors that cross-refer to the events described by antecedent clauses. A semantics for plurality and quantification is developed in the remaining chapters, which address some of the empirical and formal questions raised by the variety of interpretations in which plurals and quantifiers participate.

Big Events, Small Clauses

Big Events, Small Clauses
Author: Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2012-10-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 311028586X

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This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaboration across seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian, French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative small clauses (“absolutes”), participle constructions and related clause-like but non-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect to constitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowest sense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connected with but not part of the matrix event. The book falls in two parts. Part I addresses central theoretical issues: How is the co-eventive interpretation of such adjuncts achieved? What is the internal syntax of participial and converb constructions? How do these constructions function at the discourse level, as compared to various finite structures that are available for co-eventive elaboration? Part II takes an empirical cross-linguistic perspective. It consists of five self-contained chapters that are based on parallel corpora and study either the use of a specific construction across at least two of the seven object languages, or how a specific construction is rendered in other languages.

Formal Perspectives on Secondary Predication

Formal Perspectives on Secondary Predication
Author: Marcel den Dikken, Hideki Kishimoto
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2024-05-17
Genre:
ISBN: 3110981939

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A Semantics for Groups and Events

A Semantics for Groups and Events
Author: Peter Lasersohn
Publisher: Routledge Library Editions: Semantics and Semiology
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2018-02-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781138691797

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First published in 1990, this dissertation presents an event-based model-theoretic semantics for plural expressions in English. The author defends against counterarguments the hypothesis that distributive predicates are predicates of groups, and not just individuals. By defining the collective/distributive distinction in terms of event structure, he solves formal problems with previous group-level analyses. The author notes that certain adverbials have a systematic ambiguity between a reading indicating collective action, and readings indicating spatial or temporal proximity; the event-based definition of collective action makes possible a parallel treatment of these readings. This book presents a formal proposal on the algebraic structure of groups and events, and a semantically based analysis of number agreement.

New Thinking about Propositions

New Thinking about Propositions
Author: Jeffrey C. King
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2014-01-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191502707

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Philosophy (especially philosophy of language and philosophy of mind), science (especially linguistics and cognitive science), and common sense all sometimes make reference to propositions—understood as the things we believe and say, and the things which are (primarily) true or false. There is, however, no widespread agreement about what sorts of things these entities are. In New Thinking about Propositions, Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks argue that commitment to propositions is indispensable, and that traditional accounts of propositions are inadequate. They each then defend their own views of the nature of propositions.