25.135, Review: Semantics: Arsenijevi=?UTF-8?Q?=C4=87=2C_Gehrke_&_Mar=C3=ADn_?=(eds.) (2013)

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Subject: 25.135, Review: Semantics: Arsenijević, Gehrke & Marín (eds.) (2013)

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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2014 09:58:37
From: Eugenia Romanova [evgeniya.romanova at icloud.com]
Subject: Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-1173.html

EDITOR: Boban  Arsenijević
EDITOR: Berit  Gehrke
EDITOR: Rafael  Marín
TITLE: Studies in the Compostion and Decomposition of Event Predicates
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy
PUBLISHER: Springer
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Eugenia Romanova, Institute of International Relations, Yekaterinburg

SUMMARY

The book is a collection of nine articles connected by the common topic of
event composition and decomposition. Seven articles are written from the
(formal) semantics perspective, two closing chapters from the perspective of
psycholinguistics. There is no explicit syntactic analysis in the book, which
makes one wonder whether the idea of (de)composition of event predicates is
purely semantic. However in the final chapter this idea is questioned and
experimentally tested, and shown as not quite right.

The book opens with an Introduction by the editors, Boban Arsenijević, Berit
Gehrke and Rafael Marín. It reviews the existing literature and presents the
structure of the book, and connects previous works with the topics covered by
the articles in the volume.

Chapter 2, “On the Criteria for Distinguishing Accomplishments from
Activities, and Two Types of Aspectual Misfits,” is by Anita Mittwoch. It
offers eight criteria for distinguishing accomplishments from activities, not
all of which are equally important. At the end of the chapter we learn that
the crucial criterion is telos, and when it is absent or deficient, we do not
deal with accomplishments. This happens in case of DP arguments with vague
indefinite quantifiers - ‘some’, ‘a few’, ‘many’, or in the predicates
impossible to classify as telic or atelic. In discussing these so-called
misfits, the author addresses the important issue of the imperfective paradox
and mentions some of its solutions in the literature.

Chapter 3, “Lexicalized Meaning and Manner/Result Complementarity,” by Beth
Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav discusses the problem of manner/result
complementarity in general and two counterexamples to this complementarity, in
particular. The counterexamples are provided by the verbs ‘cut’ and ‘climb’.
Both verbs are deemed polysemous; and when one sense is used, the other is
suspended. It is claimed that ‘cut’ is in fact a result verb and its manner
interpretation is conventional, but not lexicalized in the verb, whereas
‘climb’ is a manner verb with no component of direction of motion. The strict
distinction between the meaning lexicalized by the verb and the meaning
provided by its context is crucial for the analysis of verb classes.

Chapter 4, “Oriented Adverbs and Object Experiencer Psych-Verbs,” by Fabienne
Martin discusses the compatibility of certain adverbial interpretations with
agentive, weakly agentive and non-agentive verbs.

Chapter 5, “Two Sources of Scalarity within the Verb Phrase,” by M. Ryan
Bochnak covers the issues of degree predication and degree modification.
Proportional modifiers (‘half’, ‘partly’ and ‘completely’) are studied with
quantity and quality scales, mostly lexicalized by the arguments of
incremental theme verbs.

Chapter 6, “Interaction of Telicity and Degree Gradation in Change of State
Verbs,” by Jens Fleischhauer, is another study of degree predicates. This
article investigates two types of verb gradation: degree and extent. Degree
modifiers also differ from each other: one class entails the truth of
unmodified predication, the other does not. The main modifier of interest is
‘sehr’ (‘very’) in German with a short crosslinguistic presentation at the
end.

Chapter 7, “On Adverbs of (Space and ) Time,” by Kyle Rawlins considers such
adverbs as ‘quickly’ and ‘slowly’ and concludes that they only modify time,
with no real connection to space.

Chapter 8, “The Processing Domain of Aspectual Information,” by Oliver Bott is
based on psycholinguistic experiments conducted by the author. The conclusions
of this investigation demonstrate the way the aspectual makeup of the VP is
processed.

Chapter 9, “Event End-Point Primes the Undergoer Argument: Neurobiological
Bases of Event Structure Processing,” by Evie Malaia, Ronnie B. Wilbur, and
Christine Weber-Fox is a psycholinguistic study of argument and event
structure of verbal predicates.

EVALUATION

The book is not uniform in quality, in complexity of the analysis, or in the
range of topics covered by its authors, therefore different chapters will
receive different amounts of attention and criticism.

Whereas the Introduction lists nearly all the existing approaches to the
central question, very few are actually raised in the volume. The more
traditional discussions of event structure along the lines of Vendler's
classification appear in the articles by Mittwoch and Levin and Rappaport
Hovav. Both these articles are accessible to linguists of any level: they are
written in clear language, and argumentation is transparent and persuasive.

Nonetheless, the article by Mittwoch contains some technical problems. The
examples in (33), (34), (40) (p. 42) are unacceptable, yet not accompanied by
any appropriate signs (*/#). In some places the article looks more like a
handout (see, e.g., sections 2.2.7 and 2.2.8, which begin with examples and
contain one and three sentences, respectively). As a result, more explanation
would be necessary.

Chapter 4 first of all requires more editing, since it is full of typos and
imprecision. Some French examples are not glossed or translated (pp. 72-73),
on p. 77 ‘live’ is used instead of ‘leave’, on p. 78 instead of the adverb
‘cleverly’ from example (16) (p. 77) we see ‘stupidly’ throughout the
discussion. In footnote 7 (p. 78) ‘itself’ refers to Geuder; on p. 84, instead
of ‘TEMPORAL INDEPENDENCE’ ‘TEMPORAL INTERDEPENDENCE’ is used. When examples
are taken from the Internet, the reference is very general (the Internet) (p.
88) without any concrete links. On p. 92, example numbering is interrupted by
the footnote, so in the main text, (49) is followed by (51). On the same page
in footnote 20, the pronoun ‘he’ refers to the adverb ‘gradually’.

More serious comments concern the interpretations of adverbials proposed by
the author, and disregard of aspectual interference and the process of
coercion. Thus, if one translated the French examples in (11) on p. 75 into
Russian, the acceptability of subjective adverbs (like ‘cautiously’ and
‘patiently’) with what the author calls weakly agentive object experiencer
psych verbs (‘attract’, ‘fascinate’, ‘find’, ‘interest’) depends on
grammatical aspect: such adverbs are ungrammatical only with perfective verbs.
Considering that French has the perfective-imperfective distinction as well,
it would be interesting to see whether this interaction is also found. This
comment also arose in connection with the example cited from Piñon (1997) (p.
90).  Piñon explains the compatibility of some achievements with the
progressive aspect by a meaning shift (‘he was winning the race’ = ‘he was
ahead of the race’). Martin rejects this observation on the grounds that
(45-a) (‘He won the race cleverly’) and (45-b) (‘He was ahead of the race
cleverly’) have different meanings. But of course they do, since the author
again brushes aside the aspect interference with the interpretation of verbs
and (dispositional) adverbs. Martin first talks about progressive in
connection to the adverb ‘patiently’ on pp. 91-92, two pages before the
conclusion. This inaccuracy is also observed with respect to lexical aspect:
in (52) (p. 93) ‘found out’ and ‘found’ are analyzed as the same lexical item,
and the difference between the two readings is explained here by context.
Thus, the detailed classification of subjective adverbs given on p. 76 and
argued for in the paper runs into some confusion, which is a pity, as the
paper raises very interesting and important issues.

Chapter 5 is an attempt to assign different scalar structures, testable by
proportionate modifiers, to incremental theme verbs. The existence of two
types of scale is demonstrated by the following ambiguous examples ((18), p.
108), in which ‘half’ can modify either the predicate (quality scale) or the
nominal (quantity scale):

1. a. The meat is half cooked. 
b. The glasses are half full. 

The author claims that “incremental theme verbs are simple activity predicates
that neither lexicalize a degree argument nor directly select for their
internal argument” (p. 109). This statement requires serious argumentation.
Likewise, the proposal on p. 114 that incremental theme verbs “do not show a
strong attachment to their direct object” needs more elaboration. The fact
that some incremental theme verbs can be used intransitively, exemplified in
(23) (p.111) and (28) (p.114), does not actually mean that some object is not
implied. On p. 114, two additional pieces of evidence for a weak connection
between incremental theme verbs and their themes are cited from Rappaport
Hovav (2008) - resultatives and prefixation with ‘out-’:

2. (29) Cinderella scrubbed her knees sore.
3. (30) Cinderella out-scrubbed her step-sisters.

In these cases, the themes are introduced by the resultative heads/prefixes
and do not really look like “incremental themes” I am used to. It would be
useful for the author to define what he understands under “incrementality”.
 
The examples in (24) (p. 111) should demonstrate that “VPs headed by
incremental theme verbs do not accept the full range of degree morphology that
would otherwise be expected if there was in fact an open degree argument at
this level”:

4. a. ??Tim wrote the paper more than Tommy did.
b.??Tim wrote the paper too much. 

In fact, what these sentences show is not that “there is evidence for a lack
of an open degree argument at the VP level”, as the author claims, but rather
the input made by the quantized nominal into the gradable properties of the
VP. If the argument were homogeneous, like ‘poetry’, or absent altogether, no
problem would arise with degree modification.

My big question concerns how the solution offered in the article could be
applied to creation verbs. Either they are not incremental theme verbs, or the
solution simply does not work with them. The author postulates the functional
head mu (for measure), “which takes an incremental theme nominal and returns a
gradable event description that is true of an event whose theme is the parts
of the nominal argument, the quantity of which is equal to a degree d” (pp.
112-113). It is well known that nominal arguments of creation verbs are not
yet in existence (von Stechow 2000) and cannot feed mu. Thus, applying
Bochnak’s analysis to such a sentence as ‘The scarf was half knit’, we would
only find a quality scale, for the nominal represents an upper closed scale
and cannot be measured by ‘half’.

>From the analysis on p. 113, it follows that because of the presence of mu it
is impossible to say ‘eat half the apple’: one can only produce ‘half eat the
apple’ or ‘eat half of the apple’. Not being a native speaker of English, I
cannot be absolutely certain that the author is wrong, but I have heard the
“impossible” expression more than once.

In general, the importance of mu is not immediately clear. In the diagram on
p. 113, it is combined with the quantized noun (‘the apple’), on p. 115 it is
claimed to be able to combine with mass and bare nouns, the difference being
in the resulting scale: in the former case, it is fully closed, in the latter
open. What does mu actually do, then, in addition to introducing the internal
argument? (The explanations are given on pp. 113 and 115, but the question
remains).

Another unclear point concerns the idea of measuring the evaluation scale
provided by the verb itself. As is shown in (33) on p. 116, the verb
undergoing this measuring does not have to contain the event argument (‘like’,
‘know’, ‘hear’), yet on p. 117 the complexity of certain events becomes
important for their ability to be modified by evaluative ‘half’. Again, native
intuitions would be helpful to tell the difference between acceptable ‘half
eat’ and unacceptable ‘half melt the candle’ ((35), p. 117) from the
evaluative point of view. In my non-native opinion, what influences the
interpretation of each verb is world knowledge and context, not a key semantic
property of a predicate.  Moreover, what the author says about ‘open’ and
‘melt’ on p. 117 is applicable to some extent to ‘know’ and ‘like’ in (33) (p.
116), which are compatible with evaluative ‘half’: “there is no in-between”.

On p. 118 Bochnak uses ‘out’-prefixation as a test for the presence of the
evaluative scale, and it also seems to be dependent on context. In my view, if
you can create an appropriate scenario, you can use ‘out-’ with any verb,
including ‘melt’, as in (37b):

5. ??Elaine out-melted Larry.

Otherwise it is equally strange to use ‘out-’ even with some ‘well-behaved’
verbs, like ‘wash’. Does ‘Larissa out-washed Elena’ sound better than (5)
above ((37b), p. 118)?

Discussing the evaluative scale of ‘eat’ the author contradicts himself. The
first, evaluative, reading of ‘eat’ is described as “not a prototypical eating
event”, which does not track the quantity of the incremental theme argument
((4), p. 102). Further, he writes: “it is still an evaluative scale at issue
in these cases, where the quality of the event is evaluated based on how much
was eaten” (p. 118).

Chapter 6 differs from chapter 5 in its perspective on the nature of verbs:
its proposals hinge on the fact that “the verb lexicalizes a scalar property”
(p. 131). It begins with an introduction of two types of verb gradation:
extent and degree. The interaction of German ‘sehr’ (‘very’) with verbs and,
specifically, its influence on telicity is the subject of the article.

‘Sehr’ operates on gradable yet telic predicates, since it introduces a
standard value (after the telos has been reached on the scale), which has to
be reached to make the graded predication true. Thus, the definition of
telicity has to be very elaborate, and the author makes an attempt to review
several earlier definitions. In footnote 10 (p. 141), he mentions the notions
“relative standard telos” and “absolute standard telos”, which can either be
distinct or fall together. Unfortunately, little has been added to the
discussion of these important notions in the main text. Table 6.1 (p. 142)
presents a detailed account of event types and corresponding telos types,
followed by a discussion of their compatibility with ‘sehr’.

The main problems are found in the section on cross-linguistic comparison of
change of state verbs. The Russian examples in 6.7.1 (pp. 144-146) are full of
typos (there are at least 8), which is largely caused by the confusion of the
Latin “c” and the Cyrillic “с”.  There are more serious issues too. If the
situation is similar for German, this undermines some of the conclusions made
in the chapter. The author studies the behaviour of such verbs as ‘increase’,
‘extend’, ‘worsen’, which he identifies as degree achievements, and
‘standardize’, ‘stabilize’ and ‘unify’, which he identifies as
accomplishments. While the examples with the first group of verbs ((27), pp.
144-145) are acceptable, the examples with the second group ((28) p. 145, (29)
p. 146) sound really marginal. The author found them in blogs and comment
sections on the Internet, and, in my view, they represent cases of coercion
similar to the change of non-gradable adjectives into gradable (‘very
wooden’).  I think more research is necessary on this particular class of
verbs in connection with ‘sehr’-modification.

Section 6.7.2 with French examples also evokes doubt. For some reason
‘modify/change’ is assigned to the class of degree achievements (32-c, p.
148). Another moot point is the comparison of the French modifier ‘beaucoup’
to German ‘sehr’ and Russian ‘ochen’ (p. 147). Is it legitimate, considering
that ‘beaucoup’, unlike its counterparts in the other two languages, can
modify both the frequency and the intensity of events/states (Obenauer
(1984))?

Chapter 7 discusses adverbs of space and time and develops an idea that they
are basically just adverbs of time. Two crucial examples are given ((1), p.
154), where two different types of measure phrases characterize rate and
temporal extent:

6. a. Alfonso ran to the park 2 miles per hour more quickly than Joanna.
b. Alfonso ran to the park 2 minutes more quickly than Joanna. 

‘Quickly’ is considered to be ambiguous: in (6a), it tells something about
manner, in (6b) about time. The author also says that the lexical aspect of
the verbal predicate is different in the two cases above: in the first
sentence it represents an activity, and in the second sentence an
accomplishment.

Manner modification receives further attention. Manner adverbs represent a
degree function and “the degree predication distributes over event structure”
(p. 164). This complicated proposal is supported by really complicated
arguments. I had the biggest difficulty with the idea of atomicity of
homogeneous verbal predicates (pp. 169-170), especially when atoms of
‘running’ were presented as individual steps or even some ‘motions’ (p. 171).
What would atoms of ‘working’ and other homogeneous predicates be then? The
author actually addresses this question on p. 171, but he gives no answer. He
needs atoms in homogeneous predicates to be distributed over by the
pluractional operators, as he calls adverbs of space and time (p. 168). It is
not clear why, though, since there are already multiple atoms in the structure
of modified events.

Some of the analyses (e.g., (60), p. 170, (79), p. 180) remain unexplained,
some questions are raised just for our information (on neo-Davidsonian
analysis, p. 158), and some serious theoretical claims from previous work are
mentioned as an aside (a minimal cover of the part-whole structure from
Schwarzschild 1996, pp. 171-172). Instead I would prefer more explanations of
the ideas the author develops, because I still could not grasp the depth of
‘winning the race’ (which he calls an “accomplishment with no internal
activity component”, p. 172) representing a homogeneous join semi-lattice even
if a “trivial one consisting of that event itself” (p. 172).

Another part with novel ideas is about sentence modification and narrative
discourse (7.4.2, pp. 174-180). The idea of “narrative aspect” (pp. 177-178),
which is of some importance for the theory developed, is never sufficiently
accounted for. The author just says that it resembles perfective (p. 177), as
if it is immediately clear what “perfective” means.

The author also describes events contained within narrative events (p. 178),
which leaves some gaps between the events proper. For some reason, these gaps
are located at the beginning of narrative events and they can be operated on
by adverbs attaching high in the clause and, as a result, having inceptive
readings. Thus, ‘quickly, Alfonso sneezed’ means that little time has passed
after the previous event took place ((75), p. 178). So, even statives can be
licensed where adverbs like ‘quickly’ appear:

7. Alfonso walked into the room. Suddenly/quickly, the students were asleep.
((77), p. 179)

I am not sure whether it correctly describes the situation in all cases. For
instance, in (80) (p. 180) it looks like we could place ‘quickly’ in a
different slot and the interpretation of the sentence would not change.

The chapter closes with some discussion of puzzling properties of measure
phrases, where their readings more or less boil down to temporal.

Chapter 8 is one of the most clearly written articles of the volume. It takes
the existing studies of aspectual interpretation and demonstrates which of
them has validity in the light of four psycholinguistic experiments featuring
word order variations in German. You can see what is crucial for processing
aspectual information, the interaction of the verb with its arguments or the
influence of adverbials.

Chapter 9 is a technical psycho-/neurolinguistics paper, which makes it
difficult for laymen to understand some of the terminology - it has obviously
been written for specialists within the authors’ field, therefore explanations
for a number of terms (ERP, TOAL-3 LG, left anterior negativity, early left
anterior negativity) must be searched for elsewhere. The article is the
shortest in the collection, yet it looks neat and on the basis of elaborate
analysis supports an important theoretical point: thematic roles are processed
“as structural positions within an event-argument structure complex” (p. 246).

Thus, the analysis of event predicates in this volume is mostly done through
the prism of adverbial modification and degree semantics, and, although there
is almost no discussion of event (de)composition from syntactic positions, an
important contribution is made, especially by psycholinguists in the last two
articles.

REFERENCES

Obenauer, Hans-Georg. 1984. On the identification of empty categories.
Linguistic Review 4:153–202.

Piñon, Christopher. 1997. Achievements in an event semantics. In “Proceedings
of semantics and linguistic theory 7”, eds. Aaron Lawson, and Eun Cho,
273-296. Ithaca: CLC Publications, Cornell University.

Rappaport Hovav, Malka. 2008. Lexicalized meaning and the internal temporal
structure of events. In “Theoretic and crosslinguistic approaches to the
semantics of aspect”, eds. Edit Doron, Malka Rappaport Hovav, and Ivy Sichel,
21-38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 
Schwarzschild, Roger. 1996. “Pluralities”. Dordrecht/ Boston/ London: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.

von Stechow, Arnim. 2000. Temporally opaque arguments in verbs of creation.
Available at http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~astechow/Aufsaetze/Bonomi.pdf.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Eugenia Romanova holds a PhD from Tromsø University in Norway. Her thesis
deals with the problems of verbal prefixation, event and argument structure
and syntax-semantics interface in the Russian language. At present she is a
lecturer in linguistics at a private university in Yekaterinburg, Russia.








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