Two Structures for Compositionally Derived Events

Abstract

This paper addresses the phenomenon of event composition: the derivation of a single event description expressed in one clause from two lexical heads which could have been used in the description of independent events, each expressed in a distinct clause.In English, this phenomenon is well attested with respect to sentences whose verb is found in combination with an XP describing a result not strictly lexically entailed by this verb, as in ( 1).(1)The joggers ran the pavement thin.This sentence makes reference to a complex event encompassing an event of run ning and an event of becoming thin.The lexical heads run and thin appear in a single clause, with the AP appearing as closely bound to the verb in the syntax as subcategorized complements (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995; Tenny 1994;Roberts 1988), justifying the assumption that a single event is made reference to by this sentence.We consider (1) to be an instance of event composition since its verb, run, on its own does not entail a particular result state, and certainly not a result state that does not involve the runner.Furthermore, the components of the event described in this example could have been expressed in separate clauses, as in Th e joggers ran and they caused the pavement to become thin or as in The joggers caused the pavement to become thin by running.We address two major questions concerning event composition.I The first is: What relation must hold between two events in order for the event structures representing them to be able to be composed into one event structure expressible in a single clause?The second is: What is the nature of the event structures of compositionally derived events?It has been claimed that only causally related events can be composed (e.g., Croft 1991;Gawron 1985; Kaufmann 1995b; though see Wu nderlich 1997 though see Wu nderlich a, 1997b, who , who proposes that contemporaneous events can also be composed).As a conse quence, it is also frequently assumed that event composition results in the linguistic event structure of a causative verb.Causative event structures are distinctive in that they are composed of two subevents, each of which can itself stand alone as a well-formed event structure, contrasting with simple event structures, which consist of only a single subevent.Surprisingly, there has been little discussion of exactly what criteria make a causative, rather than a simple, event structure appropriate for compositionally derived events.In this paper, we present evidence from the syntax of nonlexically entailed result XPs in English that although many instances of event composition yield a causative event structure, in other instances a simple event structure is more appro priate.We show that in those instances where a simple event structure is preferable, the semantic relation between the components of the compositionally derived event is tighter than the relation which holds between the components of a causative event

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 213 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.