Structuring Sense: Volume Ii: The Normal Course Of Events (oxford Linguistics)

Structuring Sense explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes, of which this is the first, that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about human mind and language. Hagit Borer departs from both constructional approaches to syntax and the long generative tradition that uses the word as the nucleus around which the syntax grows. She argues that the hierarchical, abstract structures of language are universal, not language specific, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. The Normal Course of Events applies this radical approach to event structure. Integrating research results in syntax, semantics, and morphology, the author shows that argument structure is based on the syntactic realization of semantic event units. The topics she addresses include the structure of internal arguments and of telic and atelic interpretations, accusative and partitive case, perfective and imperfective marking, the unaccusative-unergative distinction, existential interpretation and post-verbal subjects, and resultative constructions. The languages discussed include English, Catalan, Finnish, Hebrew, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Contents......Page 10 Acknowledgements......Page 8 Contents to Volume I......Page 13 Abbreviations......Page 16 A Note on Transcription......Page 17 Part I: Setting Course......Page 18 1.1 How Grammatical are Words?......Page 20 1.2 Functional Structure and the Architecture of Heads......Page 28 1.3 A Note on Inflection......Page 39 1.4 A Note on Idioms......Page 42 2.1 Variable-behaviour Verbs......Page 47 2.2 But Why Aktionsart?......Page 64 2.3 UTAH?......Page 72 2.4 Severing the Internal Argument from its Verb......Page 76 Part II: The Projection of Arguments......Page 84 3.1 Preliminaries......Page 86 3.2 Structuring Quantity......Page 90 3.3 Prepositional Licensing......Page 104 4.1 Where Are We?......Page 114 4.2 Atelic Transitives and Partitive Case......Page 116 4.3 Impersonal Null Subjects and the Unaccusative–Unergative Paradigm......Page 129 5.1 Introduction......Page 138 5.2 Against Lexical Encoding......Page 144 5.3 To Quantity or to Quantize?......Page 160 5.4 Scalar Representations and Telicity......Page 166 6.1 From the Head to the Specifier: Quantity prefixes and DP interpretation......Page 172 6.2 Against Atelic Agreement......Page 177 6.3 Licensing DP-internal Structure......Page 190 7.1 Slavic Intransitive Perfectives......Page 199 7.2 Does the Perfective Mark Quantity?......Page 207 7.3 Telicity Without Verkuyl's Generalization—English......Page 217 8.1 Preliminaries......Page 231 8.2 What Gets Modified?......Page 249 8.3 A Somewhat Speculative Note on the Conceptual Status of Some Predicate Modifiers......Page 262 Part III: Locatives and Event Structure......Page 270 9.1 Introduction: Post-verbal Nominatives......Page 272 9.2 Projecting the Event Argument......Page 278 9.3 Assigning Range to 〈e〉[sub(E)]—The Locative Paradigm......Page 289 9.4 Why Locatives?......Page 302 9.5 Why a Weak Subject?......Page 315 9.6 Transitive Expletives? In Hebrew??......Page 320 9.7 Conclusion......Page 322 10.1 Re-Examining the Paradigm......Page 323 10.2 And Returning to Erupting Riots......Page 336 10.3 Achievements?......Page 343 10.4 Summary......Page 355 11.1 Inter-Language and Intra-Language Variation......Page 360 11.2 Some Final Notes on the Nature of Listemes......Page 363 References......Page 373 H......Page 392 W......Page 393 D......Page 394 I......Page 395 M......Page 396 R......Page 397 V......Page 398 Z......Page 399 A......Page 400 B......Page 401 C......Page 402 D......Page 403 E......Page 405 G......Page 406 I......Page 407 L......Page 408 M......Page 409 P......Page 410 Q......Page 412 R......Page 413 S......Page 414 U......Page 416 Z......Page 417 Structuring Sense explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes, of which this is the second, that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about human mind and language. Hagit Borer departs from both language specific constructional approaches and lexicalist approaches to argue that universal hierarchical structures determine interpretation, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. The Normal Course of Events applies this radical approach to event structure. Integrating research results in syntax, semantics, and morphology, the author shows that argument structure is based on the syntactic realization of semantic event units. The topics she addresses include the structure of internal arguments and of telic and atelic interpretations, accusative and partitive case, perfective and imperfective marking, the unaccusative-unergative distinction, existential interpretation and post-verbal subjects, and resultative constructions. The languages discussed include English, Catalan, Finnish, Hebrew, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Exo-skeletal Explanations - A Recap -- Why Events? -- Structuring Telicity -- (a)structuring Atelicity -- Interpreting Telicity -- Direct Range Assignment : The Slavic Paradigm -- Direct Range Assignment : Telicity Without Verkuyl's Generalization -- How Fine-grained? -- The Existential Road : Unergatives And Transitives -- Slavification And Unaccusatives -- Forward Oh! Hagit Borer. Series Statement From Spine. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [356]-373) And Indexes.