Chris Kennedy (U Chicago) will be giving a colloquium on Friday, Oct 30th at 4pm in the 1st floor classroom of 10 Washington Place. His talk is titled "Aspectual composition and scalar change". A reception will follow on the second floor.
Abstract:
Current theories of aspect acknowledge the pervasiveness of verbs of
variable telicity, and are designed to account both for why these
verbs show such variability and for the complex conditions that give
rise to telic and atelic interpretations. Previous work has identified
several sets of such verbs, including incremental theme verbs, such as
eat and destroy; degree achievements, such as cool and widen; and
directed motion verbs, such as ascend and descend. As the diversity in
descriptive labels suggests, most previous work has taken these
classes to embody distinct phenomena and to have distinct lexical
semantic analyses.
In Kennedy and Levin 2008, we suggest that it is possible to provide a
unified analysis in which the behavior of all of these verbs stems
from a single shared element of their meanings: a function that
measures the degree to which an object changes relative to some scalar
dimension over the course of an event. Focusing on the case of degree
achievements, we claim that such "measure of change" functions are
derived from two more basic concepts: an underlying measure function,
which we take to be the basic denotation of expressions that are
lexicalized in many languages as gradable adjectives, and a general
operation mapping basic measure functions into functions which measure
the difference between two objects on a scale, which underlies the
semantics of comparatives.
The goal of this talk is twofold. First, I will give an overview of
the Kennedy and Levin proposal, providing further arguments supporting
the link between comparison and scalar change in degree achievements
based on cross-linguistic data involving the morphosyntax of change of
state verbs and the syntax and semantics of verbal
comparatives. Building on these observations, I will then show how the
can be extended to the class of English incremental theme verbs by
incorporating ideas from Schwarzschild 2006 about the place of measure
functions in the nominal projection. I will conclude by discussing
some typological implications of the analysis.
References:
Kennedy, Christopher and Beth Levin. 2008. ‘Measure of change: The
adjectival core of verbs of variable telicity’. In McNally, Louise and
Christopher Kennedy (eds.), Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics,
Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schwarzschild, Roger. 2006. The role of dimensions in the syntax of
noun phrases. Syntax 9:67-110.