Transcript Lecture18

Lecture 18
Ling 442
Exercises (part 1)
1. Explain the difference between grammatical
relations and thematic roles.
2. Provide some examples of verbs with which
the subject is an agent and the object is a
patient.
3. How about verbs in which the subject is a
stimulus and the object is an experiencer?
Exercises (part 2)
4. Russell’s example.
(a) First man: I thought your yacht was longer
than it is.
(b) Second man: No. My yacht is not longer than
it is.
What did the first man mean?
What did the second man suggest that the first
man meant?
Davidsonian semantics
• Davidson (1967)
• Action sentences involve existential
quantification over events
(1)Jones buttered the toast slowly with a knife in
the bathroom at midnight.
Why do we need events?
One argument: entailment — (1) entails the
same sentence without some/all of the
adverbial expressions.
Davidson and entailments
• One of the original arguments concerns
entailments. If we can represent (1) as in (2), then
we can show that (1) entails (3), represented here
as in (4).
1. Jones buttered the toast with a knife.
2. e [buttered (j, the_toast, e) & x[knife (x) & with
(e, x)]]
3. Jones buttered the toast.
4. e [buttered (j, the_toast, e)]
Davidson
• Anaphora
• He did it in the bathroom.
• The pronoun it is claimed to refer to the event
of his buttering the toast.
Event nouns revisited
• I mentioned before that the existence of event
nouns supports Davidson’s ontology.
• We can also create event nouns from verbs
using the –ing suffix: And you can create one
by adding –ing: meeting, signing, crossing, etc.
They are common nouns.
Event-related readings of nouns
• Krifka (1990), etc.
• Four thousand ships passed through the lock
last year.
• The library lent out 23,000 books in 1987.
• The dry cleaners cleaned 5.7 million bags of
clothing in 1987.
• 12,000 persons walked through the turnstile
yesterday.
Aren’t events subtypes of
individuals?
• Very few predicates accept both “regular”
individuals and events.
• Event-oriented predicates: occur, take place,
happen
• Individual-oriented predicates: X meets …, X
laughs, cries, sleeps, etc.
• Those that accept both: be nice, be good, etc.
Events and States
• Events and states can be introduced as distinct
types of entities in our ontology.
• We can then use these events and states to
describe and explain the behavior of various
sentences in discourse contexts (and
elsewhere).
A different approach to adverbials
• An adverb (or a PP adverbial) can be analyzed
as a VP modifier. That is, it is a function that
takes a VP meaning (a set) as its input and
returns a VP meaning as its value.
• E.g. ⟦sleep⟧ = {x | x sleeps}
•
⟦soundly⟧ = that function F such that
{x | x sleeps}  F  {x | x sleeps soundly}
INPUT
OUTPUT
Neo-Davidsonian approaches
• Thematic roles become predicates of events in
Neo-devidsonian approaches
Neo-Davidsonian developments
• Davidson: the main predicate gets an event
argument (as well as nominal arguments).
e[hit (j, b, e)]
• Neo-Davidsonian: the main predicate (like
verb/adj) is a one-place event predicate. We
then posit “thematic roles” as two-place
predicates relating events and individuals.
e[hit (e) & agent (j, e) & patient (b, e)]
Recent developments
• Kratzer argues that the “external argument” of
a transitive verb is not really the verb’s
argument. It is an argument licensed by
“voice”.
• In terms of notation, the neo-Davidsonian
method allows us to adopt the above idea.
But Davidson’s original does not.