Natasha Abner – University of Michigan
Event Structure (syntax-semantics interface, advanced)
Course material: bit.ly/25AbnerEGG
Event structure provides an ideal window onto the linguistic system, in part because the task demands of processing events in the world are much like those of processing language: an ongoing and continuous perceptual stream is segmented by the human mind into discrete spatiotemporal units (Zacks & Tversky, 2001). Moreover, the conceptual output of this segmentation, events, provides frames around which we plan linguistic messages (Levelt, 1989) and there are “deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure” (Ünal et al., 2019).
Two core dimensions of events are their spatiotemporal structure and their participants. In language, these dimensions are manifest in aspect and argument structure, and the complex interaction between the two has been modeled using a variety of frameworks — e.g., Cognitive Linguistics (Talmy, 2000), Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995), Tree Adjoining Grammar (Kallmeyer & Osswald, 2013), and Generative Grammar (Ramchand 2008). What these approaches have in common is the idea that aspectual contrasts and aspect-argument interactions can be accounted for by decomposing events into sub-event components, each of which makes its own aspectual contributions and is associated with its own argument structural properties.
This course will help students develop an understanding of decompositional approaches to event structure, and how such analyses fit in the theory and theoretical development of syntax and semantics more generally. Empirically the course will draw on cross-linguistic data from diverse languages, including sign languages, which may offer unique insight on the structural composition of events. The course will also incorporate the foundational research on which more contemporary approaches to event structure are built. Though focused on events as part of the linguistic system, the course will also consider how human event cognition is reflected in how we talk about events.