Objecthood: An event structure perspective

Abstract

this paper. Since transitive verbs necessarily have objects, a challenge for theories of transitivity is how to deal with the just-mentioned problems involving the semantic correlates of objecthood. In this paper I revisit these issues from a novel perspective, showing that the notion `object' of a transitive verb can be fruitfully explored in the context of recent work on the structure and representation of verb meaning and the licensing of arguments. Much recent research has converged on the notion `event' as an important organizing notion in the linguistic representation of meaning, and the grammatically-relevant component of a representation of verb meaning is now often called an `event structure' because its form is determined by the basic event type of the verb. I suggest that two distinct event structures can give rise to objects: a complex, causative event structure and a simple event structure. I argue that these two sources for objects shed light on some of the well-known challenges associated with the semantic underpinnings of objecthood. I use the transitive verbs of English to make these points, although I believe that the results of this research will largely generalize across languages (see section 4). 1. The `other' transitive verbs

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