Revisiting -ej(ar) verbs in Catalan: Argument and event structure

Verbs Aspect and Argument Structure

Event Structure and the Classification of Verbs

In the present article it will be assumed that events may be split into subevents and that there is a temporal relationship of precedence or overlap between subevents. Event structure is understood as the set of subevents together with the temporal relationship holding between them. An essential part of event structure can be determined by means of temporal adverbials. It will be claimed that a...

Semantic Combinatorial Processes in Argument Structure: Evidence from Light Verbs

1. Introduction Any theory of how language is internally organized and how it interacts with other mental capacities must address the fundamental question of how syntactic and lexico-semantic information interact at one central linguistic compositional level, the sentence level. With this general objective in mind, we examine “ " light-verbs” " , so called because the main thrust of the semanti...

Representing Verbs as Argument Concepts

Verbs play an important role in the understanding of natural language text. This paper studies the problem of abstracting the subject and object arguments of a verb into a set of noun concepts, known as the “argument concepts”. This set of concepts, whose size is parameterized, represents the finegrained semantics of a verb. For example, the object of “enjoy” can be abstracted into time, hobby ...

Verbs and (sub)Event Structure: A Case Study from Italian

In this paper, I try to show the advantages of analyzing events in terms of subevent structure, by taking into consideration the case of a specific class of verbs: transitive and intransitive verbs which obligatorily require the presence of a predicative complement (e.g., English seem, consider). The proposed analysis is exemplified with data from Italian. Two verbs are described in detail: rim...