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On affectedness

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Abstract

Affectedness—usually construed as a persistent change in or impingement of an event participant—has been implicated in argument realization, lexical aspect, transitivity, and various syntactic operations. However, it is rarely given a precise, independently-motivated definition. Rather, it is often defined intuitively or diacritically, or reduced to the properties it is meant to explain, especially lexical aspect. I propose a semantic analysis of affectedness as a relationship between a theme participant that undergoes a change and a scale participant that measures the change (following Beavers 2008a, 2009 and Kennedy and Levin 2008). I justify this analysis by re-examining the empirical diagnostics for affectedness, and argue that affectedness is not reducible to lexical aspect, but is tightly correlated with it in a way that motivates an analysis involving two interdependent participants. This model also provides a precise way of defining the pervasive notion of degrees of affectedness, as a hierarchy of monotonically weakening truth conditions about the result state of the theme on the scale. This hierarchy further captures important subset relations among predicates regarding affectedness diagnostics, and ultimately brings together many of the above phenomena under a single, unified approach.

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    John Beavers

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Beavers, J. On affectedness. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 29, 335–370 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9124-6

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