Modelling the Progressive and Coercion using the Event Calculus Bachelor Thesis

This bachelor thesis summarises Hamm and van Lambalgen’s book ”The proper treatment of events”. The main points are addressed to provide an overview of the Event Calculus and its usage in natural language semantics. The Event Calculus is a formal system derived from the Situation Calculus that allows for the representation of overlapping events and partial changing objects. Its ontology comprises three types: events, fluents and time points. Thus, natural language expressions are decomposed into such elements construing a scenario to represent what is claimed to be the sense of that expression. This thesis exemplifies several principles and mechanisms involved in this representation using mainly verb phrases. Further, a process called ’coercion’ is described which labels the phenomenon that one verb can occur with different aspectual classes, here distinguished according to Vendler. Coercion is represented by the Event Calculus by modifying a ’default’ scenario of that expression and thereby creating a related scenario, thus a relation between the two aspectual classes is established. The progressive is a tense that often induces change of aspectual class and therefore is an excellent sample for investigations on coercion. Because this algorithmic approach is claimed to model sense and reference and thus to replace the conventional possible worlds semantics, a discussion on this issue follows the detailed analysis of the single aspects.