Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates

Boban Arsenijevic is a Ramon y Cajal researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Madrid. His interests cover different topics in syntax and semantics, including the issues of verbal aspect, clausal embedding, the nature of and mutual relations between syntactic categories and the comparative cognitive status of natural language.

This detailed, perceptive addition to the linguistics literature analyzes the semantic components of event predicates, exploring their fine-grained elements as well as their agency in linguistic processing. The papers go beyond pure semantics to consider their varying influences of event predicates on argument structure, aspect, scalarity, and event structure.

The volume shows how advances in the linguistic theory of event predicates, which have spawned Davidsonian and neo-Davidsonian notions of event arguments, in addition to 'event structure' frameworks and mereological models for the eventuality domain, have sidelined research on specific sets of entailments that support a typology of event predicates. Addressing this imbalance in the literature, the work also presents evidence indicating a more complex role for scalar structures than currently assumed. It will enrich the work of semanticists, psycholinguists, and syntacticians with a decompositional approach to verb phrasestructure.

1. Boban Arsenijevic, Berit Gehrke & Rafael Marín: Introduction: The (De)composition of Event Predicates .- 2. Anita Mittwoch: On the Criteria for Distinguishing Accomplishments from Activities, and Two Types of Aspectual Misfits .- 3. Beth Levin & Malka Rappaport Hovav: Lexicalized Meaning and Manner/Result Complementarity .- 4. Fabienne Martin: Oriented Adverbs and Object Experiencer Psych-verbs .- 5. M. Ryan Bochnak: Two Sources of Scalarity within the Verb Phrase .- 6. Jens Fleischhauer: Interaction of Telicity and Degree Gradation in Change of State Verbs .- 7. Kyle Rawlins: On Adverbs of (Space and) Time .- 8. Oliver Bott: The Processing Domain of Aspectual Information .- 9. Evie Malaia, Ronnie B. Wilbur & Christine Weber-Fox: Event End-Point Primes the Undergoer Argument: Neurobiological Bases of Event Structure Processing.