The Oxford Handbook of Event Structure

by Truswell, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780192845221
• ISBN10: 0192845225
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2021-10-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This handbook deals with research into the nature of events, and how we use language to describe events.

The study of event structure over the past 60 years has been one of the most successful areas of lexical semantics, uniting insights from morphology and syntax, lexical and compositional semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence to develop insightful theories of events and event descriptions. This volume provides accessible introductions to major topics and ongoing debates in event structure research, exploring what events are, how we perceive them, how we reason with them, and the role they play in the organization of grammar and discourse. The chapters are divided into four parts: the first covers metaphysical issues related to events; the second is concerned with the relationship between event structure and grammar; the third is a series of crosslinguistic case studies; and the fourth deals with links to cognitive science and artificial intelligence more broadly.

The book is strongly interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science, and will appeal to a wide range of researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

Author Biography

Robert Truswell, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh

Robert Truswell is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh, and Adjunct Professor in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa, where he was Assistant Professor from 2011-14. He works on many aspects of syntax, semantics, and their interface, as well as
syntactic and semantic change, and topics related to the evolution of language. His previous publications include the monograph Events, Phrases, and Questions (OUP, 2011), and the edited volumes Syntax and its Limits (OUP, 2014, with Raffaella Folli and Christina Sevdali) and Micro-change and
Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax (OUP, 2017, with Éric Mathieu). He is the co-author, with Daniel Altshuler, of Extraction from Coordinate Structures at the Syntax-Discourse Interface (forthcoming from OUP).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction, Robert Truswell
Part I: Events and Natural Language Metaphysics
2. Aspectual classes, Anita Mittwoch
3. Events and states, Claudia Maienborn
4. Event composition and event individuation, Robert Truswell
5. The semantic representation of causation and agentivity, Richmond H. Thomason
6. Force dynamics, Bridget Copley
7. Event structure without naïve physics, Henk J. Verkuyl
8. Event kinds, Berit Gehrke
Part II: Events in Morphosyntax and Lexical Semantics
9. Thematic roles and events, Nikolas Gisborne and James Donaldson
10. Semantic domains for syntactic word-building, Lisa Levinson
11. Neodavidsonianism in semantics and syntax, Terje Lohndal
12. Event structure and verbal decomposition, Gillian Ramchand
13. Nominals and event structure, Friederike Moltmann
14. Adjectives and event structure, Rebekah Baglini and Chris Kennedy
Part III: Crosslinguistic Perspectives
15. Lexicalization pattners, Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav
16. Secondary predication, Tova Rapoport
17. Event structure and syntax, Tal Siloni
18. Inner aspect crosslinguistically, Lisa deMena Travis
Part IV: Events, Cognition, and Computation
19. Tense and aspect in Discourse Representation Theory, Hans Kamp
20. Coherence relations, Andrew Kehler
21. Form-independent meaning-representation for eventualities, Mark Steedman
22. The neurophysiology of event processing in language and visual events, Neil Cohn and Martin Paczynski