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Event Semantics and Abstract Categorial Grammar

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The Mathematics of Language (MOL 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6878))

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Abstract

Common versions of event semantics do not naturally explain the obligatory narrow scope of existential quantification over events, or the typically event-oriented modification by adverbials. We argue that these linguistic properties reflect a distinction between overt arguments and purely semantic slots like the event argument. The distinction is naturally captured in Abstract Categorial Grammar (ACG) [1,2,3,4], which manipulates pairs of forms and meanings, a.k.a. linguistic signs. The sign’s pheno-type defines syntactic arguments and the sign’s semantic type standardly defines semantic arguments. Both these concrete types are standardly derived by induction on the structure of one abstract type (category) of the sign, by assigning pheno-level and semantic types to basic abstract types. We assume that semantic event arguments are only introduced by the (basic) result type of the verb’s abstract type, whose pheno-level type is standardly a string. Consequently semantic event arguments lack a correlate in the verb’s pheno-type. Both narrow-scope existential quantification over events and the orientation of event modifiers follow rigorously from this assumption. Based on this architecture, we develop simple accounts of adverbial modification, nominalization and passive constructions in an ACG fragment.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UiL OTS, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

    Yoad Winter & Joost Zwarts

Authors
  1. Yoad Winter
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  2. Joost Zwarts
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Makoto Kanazawa

  2. Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Acadamy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    András Kornai

  3. Fakultät Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Marcus Kracht

  4. Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Graduate School of Information Science, Japan

    Hiroyuki Seki

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Winter, Y., Zwarts, J. (2011). Event Semantics and Abstract Categorial Grammar. In: Kanazawa, M., Kornai, A., Kracht, M., Seki, H. (eds) The Mathematics of Language. MOL 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6878. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23211-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23211-4_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23210-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23211-4

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