States in the decomposition of verbal predicates
- PDF / 1,141,263 Bytes
- 54 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 86 Downloads / 173 Views
States in the decomposition of verbal predicates Evidence from additive operators Giorgos Spathas1 · Dimitris Michelioudakis2
Received: 11 October 2019 / Accepted: 16 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper proposes a new diagnostic for the detection of stative sub-events in the decomposition of verbal predicates. The diagnostic is based on a certain type of presupposition triggered by additive operators like Greek ke ‘also’, which we call Stative Presuppositions. It is argued that the generation of such Stative Presuppositions requires the existence of a syntactically accessible constituent that denotes a predicate of states that additive operators can take scope over. We investigate the distribution of Stative Presuppositions and observe that not all verbs that support inferences to a result state give rise to them. Based on this distribution we argue for a non-uniform analysis of result verbs; whereas some verbs require an event-decompositional analysis, others are better captured by scalar- and incrementality-based analyses. We cast our analysis in the framework of Distributed Morphology and propose to explain nonuniformity based on how different types of verbal roots interact with verbal functional material. Moreover, treating roots as the locus of encyclopedic information explains lexical variation in the generation of Stative Presuppositions within sub-classes of result verbs. We strengthen our conclusions by considering and rejecting alternative syntactic and semantic mechanisms for generating Stative Presuppositions. We conclude that the availability of Stative Presuppositions with additive operators is currently the most reliable diagnostic for the detection of syntactically accessible result states in verbal decomposition. Keywords Verbal semantics · Result state · Event structure · Inner aspect · Additive operators · Lexical decomposition
B G. Spathas
[email protected]
1
ZAS Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
G. Spathas, D. Michelioudakis
1 Introduction Theories of verbal predication are devised to predict which aspects of verbal meaning determine grammatically relevant behavior like classification in aspectual classes, observed entailment patterns, interaction with adverbial modification, availability of nominalization and other derivational processes, etc. In order to state the relevant generalizations, all theories rely on some sort of decomposition of verbal meaning. Such decompositions are comprised of three basic ingredients (cf. Kratzer 2015): (i) variables and logical symbols and relations, (ii) a limited set of (relational) operators (e.g., CAUSE, BECOME, COMP, POS, PART-OF, etc.), and (iii) the idiosyncratic contribution of some lexical primitive, related to encyclopedic knowledge. They differ not only in the set of operators they assume and, correspondingly, in the nature of the underlying ontology (i.e., whether they admit events, degrees, vectors, etc. and how these domains are structured), but also with respec
Data Loading...
