July
2007, LSA Linguistic Institute, Stanford University
Cleo
Condoravdi & Hana Filip
Course DescriptionThis course sets out with an examination of the role of events in
accounting for inferential properties of modification. It presents a model of
the logic of modification following the neo-Davidsonian mode of composition
but reworking the Davidsonian framework. The approach is shown to accord with more intuitively appealing
notions of event individuation and to afford a uniform treatment of
individual-denoting and quantificational arguments/modifiers, a standard
semantics for negation, and a relatively straightforward account of stacked
temporal modifiers. The exploration
of the role of events in aspect ual composition, in other types of telicity
phenomena, and in lexical meaning motivates a novel approach to telicity
which correlates event structure with the grammar of measurement and scalar
semantics. The focus will be on
extending the empirical domain to data that have so far not been (easily)
tractable within any single proposal, on cross-linguistic variation in the
expression of telicity, and its relation to perfective and imperfective
aspect. |