Linking semantics and syntax in Mandarin serial verbs: A Role and Reference Grammar account (original) (raw)

Event Structure and the Encoding of Arguments: The Syntax of the Mandarin and English Verb Phrase

This work presents a theory of linguistic representation that attempts to capture the syntactic structure of verbs and their arguments. My framework is based on the assumption that the proper representation of argument structure is event structure. Furthermore, I develop the hypothesis that event structure is syntactic structure, and argue that verb meanings are compositionally derived in the syntax from verbalizing heads, functional elements that license eventive interpretations, and verbal roots, abstract concepts drawn from encyclopedic knowledge. The overall goal of the enterprise is to develop a theory that is able to transparently relate the structure and meaning of verbal arguments. By hypothesis, languages share the same inventory of primitive building blocks and are governed by the same set of constraints-all endowed by principles of Universal Grammar and subjected to parametric variations. Support for my theory is drawn from both Mandarin Chinese and English. In particular, the organization of the Mandarin verbal system provides strong evidence for the claim that activity and state are the only two primitive verb types in Chineseachievements and accomplishments are syntactically-derived complex categories. As a specific instance of complex event composition, I examine Mandarin resultative verb compounds and demonstrate that a broad range of variations can be perspicuously captured in my framework. I show that patterns of argument sharing in these verbal compounds can be analyzed as control, thus grounding argument structure in wellknown syntactic constraints such as the Minimum Distance Principle. Finally, I argue that cross-linguistic differences in the realization of verbal arguments can be reduced to variations in the way functional elements interact with verbal roots. Overall, my work not only contributes to our understanding of how events are syntactically represented, but also explicates interactions at the syntax-semantics interface, clarifying the relationship between surface form, syntactic structure, and logical form. A theory of argument structure grounded in independently-motivated syntactic constraints, on the one hand, and the semantic structure of events, on the other hand, is able to account for a wide range of empirical facts with few stipulations.

Semantic relationships between verbs and their arguments

Language Sciences, 1996

In English and Hungarian there are some verbs and constructions that do not allow definite arguments in certain positions (Definiteness Effect). This phenomenon is related to the ambiguous, weak or strong interpretation of indefinite noun phrases. In Hungarian productive noun incorporation is possible if the verb exhibits the definiteness restriction. In this paper a model-theoretic account of these phenomena will be presented. Two disjunct structures of entities (objects and events) are used for modelling nominal and verbal denotations. The direction and other properties of the functions linking them will give an explanation to the peculiarities of the linguistic data examined. It is shown that the seemingly different constraints can be traced back to the same general mathematical properties of the semantic model.

On the Syntactic Representation of Events

To appear In Robert Truswell (ed.) Handbook of Event Structure. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

A recurrent idea in linguistic theory is that predicates have complex syntactic representations that reflect their semantics. In the past twenty years or so linguistic theory has witnessed the return of lexical, or rather syntactic, decomposition approaches, which compose event structure from its meaning ingredients instantiated as distinct syntactic heads. These are essentially modernized versions of the proposals of Generative Semantics (McCawley 1968, Lakoff 1965), which answer many of the empirical objections to decomposition. This paper examines the decompositional project, concentrating on the various arguments presented in modern literature for a decompositional treatment of the relationship between pairs of verbs that differ roughly in that one of them has one more argument than the other. The paper shows that such pairs or alternations split into several types, only one of which deserves a decompositional analysis. Our litmus test for decomposition can be defined as follows: A meaning ingredient is a syntactic head, iff it is detectable by syntactic diagnostics.

The semantics of syntactic constructions

The Sign of the V: Papers in Honour of Sten Vikner, 2019

In this paper it is shown that Danish syntactic constructions, such as accusative + infi nitive, e.g. Hun så ham komme (She saw him come), accusative + to-infi nitive, that-clauses and preposition + that-clauses, have their own type of meaning potential, exactly like lexical items, such as perception predicates: see, hear, control predicates: permit, offer, and mental NEG-raising predicates: think, hope. The types of meaning that syntactic constructions can have as predications are: state of affairs, proposition, illocution and fact. Both lexical items and syntactic constructions are polysemous and disambiguate each other when combined in a clause according to a general rule that may be stated similarly to the way that the rule for a lexical entry may. Some examples such as Hun bad ham komme (She asked him to come) and Hun lod ham begrave (She let him be buried) are identifi ed and given an explanation.

Lexical Semantics : lexicon-syntax interface

2014

This chapter deals with the lexicon-syntax interface, which is particularly interesting in Korean and currently attracting much attention in cross-linguistic studies. Theories on the lexicon-syntax interface, linking rules in particular, call for a lexicalist hypothesis such that various syntactic aspects of a sentence be determined by the lexical properties of the predicate, just as in Chomsky’s (1981, 1986) Projection Principle. Thus, this chapter aims to characterize the semantic aspects of argument realization patterns – linking rules in Korean. (Jackendoff 1990; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995; Pustejovsky 1995; Croft 2012, etc.) Furthermore, this chapter is devoted to identifying the semantic components of alternating predicates in Korean which are relevant to their ability to realize multiple argument structures. The verb classes dealt with in this chapter include psych predicates, verbs of change of location/state, and several verb classes involving causative alternation in K...

Formal representation of the syntactical environment and the semantic features of verbs

The Semantic-Syntactical Dictionary of the Bulgarian language contains information concerning the syntactical environments of lexical units, their semantic combinability, as well as the possible formation of diatheses. The first partition of the dictionary will consist of the 3 000 most frequent Bulgarian verbs with all their meanings and respective formal semantic and syntactic descriptions. The development of the Semantic-Syntactical Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language is carried out with the help of a web-based system called SYNText (SYNtactic dictionary Tool). This allows the developers of the dictionary to work independently from each other and using different operational systems (Windows or Linux), while using one and the same data base.