Aspectual and causal structure in event representations

Melissa Bowerman’s research in argument structure and verbal semantics in language acquisition has had a profound influence on the study of argument structure, including my own work. I hope to return to her the favor in a small way by contributing this outline of an analysis of verbal semantics and argument linking that offers a way of representing some of the results of Bowerman’s research. In section 1, I describe a model of the causal structure underlying argument linking that I proposed in Croft (1991) and other works, supported by crosslinguistic evidence. This model however conflated causal and aspectual structure and for this reason was flawed. In section 2, I examine a number of problems of lexical aspect in the formal and cognitive semantics literature, and offer an analysis of aspect first developed with Jerry Hobbs. In section 3, I reintroduce causal structure to the verbal semantic model, allowing us to represent causal and aspectual structure as distinct but interconnected dimensions. Finally, in section 4, I discuss some of Bowerman’s results and how the verbal semantic model might contribute to an understanding of their meaning.