LUCL Colloquium 24 March 2011

On Thursday the 24th of March, William Croft will give a lecture on "An integrated semantic representation of the causal and aspectual structure of events".

Date, time and venue

Abstract

I will present a three-dimensional model of aspect and causal structure in events, sketch analyses of some semantic phenomena in English, and discuss issues in semantic representation. Aspect can be defined as the unfolding of events over time. We represent aspect in two geometric dimensions, time and qualitative states. This representation allows us to provide a richer set of aspectual types than has been presented before. Aspectual types are construals of events denoted by verbs; that is, verbs do not have an inherent lexical aspect, but rather a potential to be construed in certain ways. Causal structure is represented as a third dimension; actually, the "dimension" is a directed, acyclic, unbranching causal chain. Some evidence supporting the causal chain model will be presented, and the distinction between so-called manner and result verbs and between two kinds of resultative constructions can be captured in terms of directed changes.

Contact

The LUCL colloquium organising committee consists of:

• Ronny Boogaart

• Marion Elenbaas

• Jessie Nixon

Please email the organisers if you are interested in giving a brief presentation of your ongoing research for one of the future work-in-progress meetings.