EVENTS AT THE SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE IN TERMS OF INTERVAL MAPPING

Boban Arsenijević

University of Graz, Austria

boban.arsenijevic@uni-graz.at

Dominant approaches to verbal aspect involve an important role of event structure, where in particular telic events are represented as structures of subevents, as well as a role of complex mereological notions distributed across the verb, its inflection and arguments, and their relations (e.g. Dowty 1979, Bach 1981, 1986, Krifka 1989, 1998, Parsons 1990). Recent theorizing has  additionally exploited scalar structures, in particlar in terms of measure functions, differential measure functions and measure of change functions, to provide simpler models, and to capture certain phenomena which proved problematic for the previous approaches (especially degree achievements and their morphological relatedness with adjectives, see Hay et al 1998, Kennedy and Levin 2008, Beavers 2008, a.o.). Beavers (2008) and Kennedy and Levin (2008) explicitly state that scalar approaches are well fitted to capture the entire range of aspectual classes and oppositions. 

I propose a novel scalar approach, which captures all the aspectual classes, and which relies only on a function which maps two scalar intervals onto each other. I argue in the talk that this function is the sole content of the verbal category, and that its concrete properties are provided by the base of the verb. A central role is assigned to the question whether and which of the verb's arguments, or alternatively adjuncts, assigns its interval properties to those established by the mapping - information about which is syntactically realized in a projection immediately above the verbal category (i.e. the mapping function). The approach relies on the fact that the mapping between two intervals entails that both must exhibit the formal properties of the more restricted one (i.e. the mapping of a bounded interval and an unbounded one requires selection of a bounded subinterval from the latter). If after composition, the intervals mapped are restricted to single degrees, a state predicate is derived, if they are restricted to two degrees - an achievement, to a bounded interval with more than three degrees - an accomplishment, and to unbounded intervals - a process. The proposed account is simpler than the predecessors in not employing event structure, in relying only on the basic properties of scalar intervals, but also in deriving rather than stipulating a number of phenomena (e.g. in deriving argument-structural cross-linguistic generalizations from the mapping function in its core).