Lecture 18

1. Lecture 18 Ling 442

2. Exercises (part 1) • Explain the difference between grammatical relations and thematic roles. • Provide some examples of verbs with which the subject is an agent and the object is a patient. • How about verbs in which the subject is a stimulus and the object is an experiencer?

3. Exercises (part 2) • Russell’s example. • First man: I thought your yacht was longer than it is. • Second man: No. My yacht is not longer than it is. What did the first man mean? What did the second man suggest that the first man meant?

4. Davidsonian semantics • Davidson (1967) • Action sentences involve existential quantification over events • Jones buttered the toast slowly with a knife in the bathroom at midnight. Why do we need events? One argument: entailment — (1) entails the same sentence without some/all of the adverbial expressions.

5. Davidson and entailments • One of the original arguments concerns entailments. If we can represent (1) as in (2), then we can show that (1) entails (3), represented here as in (4). • Jones buttered the toast with a knife. • e [buttered (j, the_toast, e) & x[knife (x) & with (e, x)]] • Jones buttered the toast. • e [buttered (j, the_toast, e)]

6. Davidson • Anaphora • He did it in the bathroom. • The pronoun it is claimed to refer to the event of his buttering the toast.

7. Event nouns revisited • I mentioned before that the existence of event nouns supports Davidson’s ontology. • We can also create event nouns from verbs using the –ing suffix: And you can create one by adding –ing: meeting, signing, crossing, etc. They are common nouns.

8. Event-related readings of nouns • Krifka (1990), etc. • Four thousand ships passed through the lock last year. • The library lent out 23,000 books in 1987. • The dry cleaners cleaned 5.7 million bags of clothing in 1987. • 12,000 persons walked through the turnstile yesterday.

9. Aren’t events subtypes of individuals? • Very few predicates accept both “regular” individuals and events. • Event-oriented predicates: occur, take place, happen • Individual-oriented predicates: X meets …, X laughs, cries, sleeps, etc. • Those that accept both: be nice, be good, etc.

10. Events and States • Events and states can be introduced as distinct types of entities in our ontology. • We can then use these events and states to describe and explain the behavior of various sentences in discourse contexts (and elsewhere).

11. A different approach to adverbials • An adverb (or a PP adverbial) can be analyzed as a VP modifier. That is, it is a function that takes a VP meaning (a set) as its input and returns a VP meaning as its value. • E.g. ⟦sleep⟧ = {x | x sleeps} • ⟦soundly⟧ = that function F such that {x | x sleeps}  F  {x | x sleeps soundly} INPUT OUTPUT

12. Neo-Davidsonian approaches • Thematic roles become predicates of events in Neo-devidsonian approaches

13. Neo-Davidsonian developments • Davidson: the main predicate gets an event argument (as well as nominal arguments). e[hit (j, b, e)] • Neo-Davidsonian: the main predicate (like verb/adj) is a one-place event predicate. We then posit “thematic roles” as two-place predicates relating events and individuals. e[hit (e) & agent (j, e) & patient (b, e)]

14. Recent developments • Kratzer argues that the “external argument” of a transitive verb is not really the verb’s argument. It is an argument licensed by “voice”. • In terms of notation, the neo-Davidsonian method allows us to adopt the above idea. But Davidson’s original does not.