What are incremental themes?

In this paper I examine the approach to incremental themes developed in Krifka 1992,1998, Dowty 1991 and others, which argues that the extent of a telic event is determined by the extent of its incrementally affected theme. This approach identifies the defining property of an accomplishment event as being the fact that the theme relation is a homomorphism from parts of the event to parts of the (incremental) theme. I show that there are a large number of accomplishments, both lexical and derived via resultative predication, which cannot be characterised in this way. I then show that it is more insightful to characterise accomplishments in terms of their internally complex structure: an accomplishment event consists of a non-incremental activity event and an incrementally structured 'BECOME' event, which are related by a contextually available one-one function in such a way that the incremental structure of the latter is imposed on the activity

Counting, Measuring And The Semantics Of Classifiers

This paper makes two central claims. The first is that there is an intimate and non-trivial relation between the mass/count distinction on the one hand and the measure/individuation distinction on the other: a (if not the) defining property of mass nouns is that they denote sets of entities which can be measured, while count nouns denote sets of entities which can be counted. Crucially, this is a difference in grammatical perspective and not in ontological status. The second claim is that the mass/count distinction between two types of nominals has its direct correlate at the level of classifier phrases: classifier phrases like two bottles of wine are ambiguous between a counting, or individuating, reading and a measure reading. On the counting reading, this phrase has count semantics, on the measure reading it has mass semantics

Counting and Measuring: a theoretical and crosslinguistic account

In this paper, I show that expressions like two glasses of wine are ambiguous between counting and measuring interpretations, and that each interpretation is associated with a different semantic representation. In each interpretation, glasses has a different function. In the counting interpretation, glasses is a relational noun, while in the measure interpretation, glasses is a measure head analogous to litre. This difference leads to a number of grammatical contrasts which can be explained by differences in the grammatical structure. I discuss whether these differences are only semantic or also expressed in the syntactic representation. The assumption that syntax directly reflects semantic interpretation leads to assigning counting NPs and measuring NPs two different syntactic structures: counting NPs are right-branching with two modifying glasses of wine, while in measure expressions the numeral and the measure head form a measure predicate two glasses which modifies the N. I show that in Modern Hebrew and Mandarin counting structures and measuring structures clearly do have different syntactic structures, reflecting the semantic differences between counting and measuring. While the evidence in the case of English is less strong, the assumption that syntax directly reflects compositional syntactic structure results in the same basic syntactic contrasts in English as well

Secondary predication and aspectual structure

This paper presents an analysis of secondary predicates as aspectual modifiers and secondary predication as a summing operation which sums the denotation of the matrix verb and the secondary predicate. I argue that, as opposed to the summing peration involved in simple conjunction, there is a constraint on secondary predication; in the 0 case of depictives, the event introduced by the matrix verb must be PART-OF the event introduced by the secondary predicate, where e1 is PART-OF e2 if the running time of e1 is contained in the running time of e2 and if e1 and e2 share a grammatical argument. I argue resultative predication differs from depictive predication in that the PART-OF constraint holds in resultative constructions between the event which is the culmination of e1 and e2: formally, while depictive predication introduces the statement PART-OF(e1,e2), resultative predication introduces the statement PART-OF(cul(e1),e2). I show that this is all that is necessary to explain the well-known properties of resultative predication

Editors\u27 Introduction

This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the 11th International Symposium on Cognition, Logic and Communication which took place in Riga, at the University of Latvia on December 10-11 2015. The choice of topic reflected a growing understanding in the community of linguists and cognitive scientists that fundamental grammatical features of language, in particular the mass/count distinction, use of number words, and plurality, reflect our grasp of non-linguistic numerical operations, in particular individuation and measurement

STATIVE PREDICATES IN THE PROGRESSIVE IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

This paper aims to investigate in which contexts stative predicates are possible in the progressive in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP). In the literature, especially on English, this is unexpected, because progressive aspect is applied on events composed by stages (event predicates). States, however, are known as segmentally homogeneous, which means that: i) they have no stages and ii) they have the subinterval property of being true at minimal instants. In the present paper, we argue that the progressive aspect can be acceptable if a stage structure is grammatically licensed on the events denoted by the stative predicate. Moreover, we also found some similarities between the constraints on progressive statives in BrP and progressive habituals in English. Then we propose that the difference in the acceptability between stative predicates in the progressive in BrP (estar amando) and in English (is loving) comes from grammatical constraints on the composition of a stage structure between these languages, rather than semantic distinctions in the progressive

The syntactic forms of predication

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1983.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIESBibliography: leaves 202-205.by Susan Deborah Rothstein.Ph.D

On the Conceptual Link between Clauses I and II of the Extended Projection Principle

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 266-27