albert gatt lin3021 formal semantics lecture 10. in this lecture we shift our focus to events, and...

Albert Gatt LIN3021 Formal Semantics Lecture 10

In this lecture We shift our focus to events, and ask: How should we think of events in natural language? How do we treat semantic issues related to events, specifically: The nature of events and event modification Time and tense Aspect and event structure Modality and possibility

What is an event? So far, weve thought of verbs (transitive and intransitive) as predicates and relations: [[sleep]] = [[eat]] = This puts them on a par with nouns: [[man]] =

Predicates of what? But notice: The argument of the semantic representation of the noun is an individual (an entity) This is evident in a typical predicative construction: Sam is a man And if we add premodifiers, we assume theyre, >, i.e. Take a noun predicate and return a complex noun predicate: Sam is a tall man

Predicates of what? But what about events? With Sam eats, it seems to be similar to the nominal case: eat(s) But what about Sam eats quickly? What is the argument of quickly? Do we want eat(s) & quick(s)? Many semanticists argue that verbs actually denote an implicit event argument. I ate a meat pie roughly means: There is an event, and this event is an eating event, and the event involves me as agent, and a meat pie as patient In other words, rather than a relation between two things (an eater and an eatee), we might think of this as a relation between three things (an event, and the eater and eatee involved in it)

A preliminary example Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. Davidson, 1980 [1967], p. 105 Some questions/observations: What does it refer to in that sentence? (The buttering event?) We have the intuition that slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom etc modify the same buttering event involving Jones and the toast. There is a difference between: Adverbs like slowly, which actually modify the event itself Phrases like in the bathroom, with a knife etc, which seem to add arguments to the event in addition to Jones and the toast.

The phenomena we want to look at Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. Davidson, 1980 [1967], p. 105 Were going to consider three classes of phenomena: 1. Thematic roles 2. Event modifiers and their relationship to nominal modifiers 3. Event reference and nominalisation

Part 1 Evidence from thematic roles

Thematic roles Weve encountered thematic roles before... Roughly, these are semantic categories that specify the roles of arguments of events: Agent, patient, location, instrument etc Their main theoretical function is to allow us to: Categorise the arguments of verbs (and of some other predicates) Make generalisations about how they combine with predicates

An example John buttered the toast. The toast was buttered by John. John = the agent The toast = the patient The roles stay the same whether its active or passive. Notice that we dont have a verb (say, sbuttered) which would be synonymous with buttered-in-the-passive and would reverse the roles: The toast sbutttered John (=the toast was buttered by John). Why?

Generalisations The apparent non-existence of verbs like sbuttered, with reversed agent/patient roles, suggests that language: is biased towards having specific properties for agents and patients (John is a more likely agent of a buttering event) maintains these roles even if the event is conceptualised in terms of the reverse relation (as with the passive) Typically: 1. Agent maps to subject 2. If there is no agent, but there is a patient, then patient maps to subject 3. If there is both an agent and a patient, then (1) applies, and patient maps to object.

An aside on Maltese and related languages Superficially, we do seem to find languages that allow the equivalent of sbuttered, i.e.: Take a verb with Agent and Patient Add something to it to morphologically to reverse the roles. Pawlu qatel ra el Ra el inqatel minn Pawlu But note: The roles are not being reversed (Pawlu is still agent) The verb nqatel is arguably marked with respect to the base form qatel. This suggests that the passive is not the basic form.

Agent and patient of what? John buttered the toast. The toast was buttered by John. Notice that we have the same event viewed in different ways: Its the same action in both cases (a buttering) It involves an agent and a patient in both cases. We might take this as prima facie evidence for the argument that: There is a single event underlying these two sentences (call it e) The agent and patient roles are relations between the event and an individual. E.g. AGENT(e) = John PATIENT(e) = the toast

Things to note If we adopt this view, then we no longer think of butter as a 2-place predicate involving 2 arguments. We would think of butter as also involving an implicit event argument. Semantically, it might look like this: In other words, we think of event sentences as: Implicitly involving an event argument Relating the explicit arguments directly to the event itself So we no longer analyse this as a 2-place predicate along the lines of butter(j,t).

Some further evidence John buttered the toast. John buttered the toast with a knife. Here, we seem to have introduced additional arguments! If we assume that [[butter]] is a two-place predicate in the first example, what happens in the second case? Do we want to have to say that butter is ambiguous? 2-place butter: agent, patient 3-place butter: agent, patient, instrument...

Some further evidence John buttered the toast. John buttered the toast with a knife. Our event-based analysis would allow us to avoid this kind of argument. In the second sentence, all weve done is introduce a third role (instrument), but its still the same butter predicate (only weve added an optional argument):

A complication (1) Sam hit the table with a hammer (2) Sam hit the hammer against the table. Do we have the same event here? Intuitively, perhaps, we do. Given an actual event in a world/model, could we describe it in either of these two ways? But the thematic roles seem different in the two cases: Sam does something to the table in (1), but to the hammer in (2). By our earlier generalisations, table is the patient in (1), but hammer is patient in (2). If we we want to keep the traditional thematic role analysis, wed be forced to conclude that hit takes different arguments in (1) and (2). But then, we cant really say its the same event! The two have different participants. Two different entries for hit?

Dowtys (1990) theory Sam hit the table with a hammer Sam hit the hammer against the table. Perhaps we should instead think of these as prototypes: Proto-agent entailments: volitional, sentient, causer, moves, exists independently Proto-patient entailments: undergoes change, changes portion by portion, causally affected, stationary, doesnt exist independently. Under this view: Sam is more agent-like Both hammer and table are roughly equally patient-like; hence we have a choice about which becomes the object. Hit is the same in the two cases; its just that we have an option about which argument to map to the patient role.

Interim summary Weve adduced some evidence for events involving an implicit event argument: The same events can be conceptualised in different ways (e.g. active/passive) but retain the same thematic roles The thematic roles relate the event to its arguments Additional roles can be introduced (often through PPs) and these are just conjoined to the whole interpretation. Weve also seen some reasons for thinking of roles as being prototypical. This helps in maintaining the event analysis, and dealing with variable mappings to the syntax.

Interim summary cont/d Things to note about the analysis: There is an implicit event argument Thematic roles are relations between the event and its arguments The event argument is existentially bound (there is an event...)

Part 2 Event modifiers

Our original example Jones buttered the toast slowly, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. Here we have: Prepositional phrases introducing extra or optional arguments (instrument, location) Manner adverb (slowly) Time adverbial (at midnight) These are all event modifiers they add some more information to the basic event of John buttering the toast.

Questions How should event modifiers be analysed? Do verb modifiers have anything in common with adjective modifiers? Can we have a single, unified theory?

Some observations Event modifiers exhibit two interesting phenomena, which, following Landman (2000), well call permute and drop Permute: 1. John buttered the toast slowly, in the bathroom, with a knife. 2. John buttered the toast in the bathroom, slowly, with a knife. We can permute the order of modifiers, and this seems to make no difference to the interpretation. (One entails the other) Drop: 1. John buttered the toast slowly, in the bathroom, with a knife. 2. John buttered the toast in the bathroom with a knife. If (1) is true, then it entails (2). In a sentence S with n modifiers, if we form a new sentence S from S by dropping one or more of these modifiers, then S S.

The parallel with adjectives Adjectival premodifiers of nouns seem to exhibit the same properties. Permute: John is a dark, thirty-something, Maltese man Therefore, John is a thirty-something, dark, Maltese man. Drop: John is a dark, thirty-something, Maltese man Therefore, John is a thirty-something, Maltese man

More parallels with adjectives Adjectives: If we set things up so that were talking about the same individual, then inferences of the following sort seem to be ok: John is a dark man. John is a basketball player. Therefore, John is a dark basketball player. But weve noted that some adjectives are exceptions to this (so- called intensional adjectives): John is a former president. John is a basketball player. *Therefore, John is a former basketball player.

More parallels with adjectives Adverbs: If we set things up so that were talking about the same event, then inferences of the following sort seem to be ok: Caesar stabbed Brutus with a knife. Caesar killed Brutus. Therefore, if the event here is the same one: Caesar killed Brutus with a knife. But some adverbs resist this (those related to belief, state of mind etc): Caesar stabbed Brutus intentionally. Caesar killed Brutus. *Therefore, if the event here is the same one: Caesar killed Brutus intentionally. NB: it is crucial that we assume that the event is the same one! (Just as its crucial in the adjective examples that were talking about the same individual)

Can we exploit the parallels? Except for a particular class of adjectives, we find remarkable flexibility in premodification of nouns, given permute and drop. Recall that, in our earlier analysis, we distinguished between: Predicative adjectives (John is tall) which are just properties: tall(j). Type: Attributive adjectives (John is a tall man) which take a noun predicate ( ) and return a complex noun predicate (also of type ). So the attributives have type, >

Attributives Attributive adjectives (John is a tall man) are of type, >, so theyre not simple predicates. What is their relationship to their predicative counterparts (John is tall)? These have simpler types ( ) and so seem more basic. Let A be an attributive adjective, and A p be its predicative counterpart. We might analyse the attributive as: This says: the attributive adjective takes a noun meaning and applies this to x. It also applies the basic adjectival meaning corresponding to A, to the same individual x. Crucially, the adjectival meaning is conjoined to the nominal meaning

Attributives Now, if attributives take a noun predicate and return a new complex predicate, we know that this can be done recursively: If we apply the above function to man we get dark man (which is itself of type ) To get fat dark man, we combine the above with the entry for fat:

Permute and drop with adjectives The crucial observation is that the semantic analysis of complex NPs with multiple attributives views these as conjunctions. The predicates are applied to the same argument (the same individual is a man, dark and fat) Logically, if we have P & Q, then: This implies P (i.e. From P & Q we can drop Q to get P) This is logically equivalent to Q & P (i.e. We can permute P&Q) This seems to be exactly what we want...

Adverbs Brutus ate quickly with a fork We want to capture the same permute/drop phenomena with verb modifiers. So, we might say that the above involves conjunction. Just like dark fat N is something like [dark(x) & fat(x) and N(x)] Lets think of this example as something like: [quick(x) & with-a-fork(x)] Problem: With John is a dark fat man, we know what x is (namely, John) But what is the x with quick and with a fork?

Take 1: subject modification Brutus ate quickly with a fork Heres a suggestion: Maybe quickly modifies the subject (Brutus), which is also the argument of the verb. eat(b) & quick(b) & with-a-fork(b) (Simplifying the analysis of with a fork for the moment) Problem: It doesnt seem natural to say that quickly is a property of Brutus himself (its a property of what he does) Consider: Kim tapped Susumo lightly (after Landman, 2000) Kim is a Sumo wrestler. Hes anything but light. We dont want to say that lightly(x) involves predicating light of Kim.

Take 2: the event argument Brutus ate the toast quickly with a fork We can resolve this problem if we take up our earlier suggestion: Events involve an implicit event argument The modifiers modify this argument directly.

Compositional interpretation Takes two arguments, but also introduces an implicit event e Just like an attributive adjective, requires a verb predicate V to return a complex verb.

Compositional interpretation Brutus ate the toast quickly To get the full interpretation, we first apply this to the toast:...and then to Brutus:

Adding modifiers Brutus ate the toast quickly with a knife To get the permute and drop phenomena, we want to have simple logical conjunction of quickly and with a knife: Observe that our logical form says: Quickly is a property of the event (as are the thematic roles) The thematic roles are relations between the event and individuals. We get the right entailments: Brutus ate the toast quickly (drop with a knife) Brutus ate the toast with a knife (drop quickly) Brutus ate the toast (drop both) Brutus ate the toast with a knife quickly (permute)

Part 3 Event reference

We are often able to refer back to an event, as though it were a thing. Compare: John met Sally. She was very pretty. She clearly refers back to the individual Sally. This suggests that we have some mental representation of the individual to refer back to. Usually, we think of these NPs as introducing a variable. So she can then hook on to the variable introduced by Sally. John met Sally. It was really traumatic. It refers back to the event. This suggests that we have some mental representation of the event to refer back to. Where does it come from? Just as Sally introduces an individual variable in the discourse, perhaps meet introduces an event variable.

Event reference Language allows us to nominalise events, i.e. To take verbs and turn them into nouns (or nouny things, like gerunds). In fact, we are able to quantify over events the way we quantify over individuals: Every farmer eats meat. Every burning consumes oxygen. We could think of these events as predicates. The noun farmer is semantically a predicate of individuals (the property of things which are farmers). The noun theft is semantically a predicate of... What? The things which are thefts are events. This would also capture the relationship between verbs and their nominalisations quite straightforwardly.

Summary Weve proposed (following Davidson) that events can be viewed as introducing an implicit event argument. Under this theory, we are able to: Deal quite flexibly with events having different numbers of participants in different contexts (eat, eat with a knife etc) Deal with event modification in much the same way that we deal with adjectival modification Account semantically for permute and drop phenomena

albert gatt lin3021 formal semantics lecture 10. in this lecture we shift our focus to events, and...

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event modifiers

buttering event

event reference

eating event

implicit event argument

event modification time

event structure modality

possibility slide