Event Structure - Detailseite

The verb run and the verb enter seem to have some semantic commonalities; for instance, they both pick out events in which some individual moves. But their meanings also differ quite a bit. Here are two ways in which they obviously differ: (a) the verb run most probably imposes a requirement on the speed of the individual’s movement, but enter imposes no such requirement, and (b) the verb enter requires that the movement implies a change of location with a certain endpoint (roughly, the inside of some structure), but run imposes no such requirement (one can run aimlessly or even in place). Now, whereas linguists have paid little attention to differences like the one in (a), they have spent many decades pondering over the exact nature and formulation of differences like the one in (b). Why so? What is the difference between (a) and (b)? The crucial observation is that whereas (a) does not seem to have any obvious consequences on the grammatical behavior of the two verbs, (b) does. For example, the difference in (b) has been argued to be the reason why run can be modified by a durative for-phrase, as in (1) Lucie ran for 30 minutes, where for 30 minutes measures how long the running lasted, but enter cannot be, as in the ungrammatical (2) *Lucie entered the room for 30 minutes (ignore the irrelevant reading in which Lucie enters and exits the room continuously for 30 minutes). The difference in (b) is a difference in Aktionsart or Inner aspect, a difference in the internal flow or constituency of the events that the verbs pick out. In this course we explore how Aktionsart/ Inner aspect determines the grammatical behavior of verbs. We focus on a particular type of theory of Aktionsart/ Inner aspect based on event structure, a decomposition of verbs that describes the causal and/ or temporal flow of the events they pick out. We discuss different classifications of Aktionsart/ Inner aspect, the motivation for (or against) event structures, their place in a theory of grammar, and their interaction with other phenomena like, e.g., argument selection.