Events as Grammatical Objects: The Converging Perspectives of Lexical Semantics and Syntax (review)

This volume grew out of a 1997 LSA Linguistic Institute workshop which, as envisioned by the organizers/editors, was intended to bring together research by lexical semanticists, logical semanticists, and syntacticians. The common theme of the gathering builds on the converging view in the field that ‘the grammars of natural languages structure and refer to events in particular ways’ (ix).

The first of four thematically organized parts of the book, ‘Morphosemantic composition of event structure’, kicks off with the introductory chapter to this volume by the editors. In ‘A history of events in linguistic theory’ (3–37), Carol Tenny and James Pustejovsky offer a solid background and present a neat overview of the issues at hand, (intended to be) comprehensible enough even for nonspecialists. In ‘The quantization puzzle’ (39–96), Hana Filip supports the common assumption that Slavic perfective verb forms are semantically quantized but rejects an analysis of prefixes as perfectivity markers. ‘On lexical verb meaning: Evidence from Salish’ (97–142) by Henry Davis and Hamida Demirdache provides evidence supporting the view that languages may differ at the level of morphosyntax, but not lexical semantic structure, and discusses some consequences for a theory of the lexicon.

‘How phrase structure encodes events’ is the subject of the second part. In ‘Event structure in syntax’ (145–85), Lisa Travis argues for a syntactic side to the substructure of events in terms of an articulated VP-structure. In ‘Event structure and ergativity’ (187–238), Elizabeth Ritter and Sarah Rosen also defend a syntactic view of event, though on a structurally higher level through an articulated agreement system. Angeliek van Hout, in ‘Event semantics in the lexicon-syntax interface: Verb frame alternations in Dutch and their acquisition’ (239–82), suggests that argument structure alternations are expressions of different event structures, offers a fitting syntactic theory, and provides some thoughts on the acquisition.

Part 3 is entitled ‘Event structure and the syntax and semantics of adverbs’. In ‘Core events and adverbial modification’ (285–334), Carol Tenny investigates theoretical and empirical aspects of adverbs that allow further study of the syntax-semantics interface. In ‘Manners and events’ (335–58), Thomas Ernst also considers adverbs. He proposes an analysis of adverbial manner modification in an event-based framework. June Wickboldt, in ‘Some effects of manner adverbials on meaning’ (359–74), points out temporal vs. causal relations, structural diagnostics for these, telicity, and the role of contrastive stress.

The final part, ‘On event and state arguments’, contains five papers. Alice ter Meulen looks at ‘How to tell events apart’ and, by concentrating on the subtitle, ‘Light verbs, SE-reflexives and Dutch verbal morphology’ (377–91), addresses how arguments of a verbal predicate affect temporal coreference. Graham Katz, a proponent of ‘Anti Neo-Davidsonianism’, argues ‘Against a Davidsonian semantics for state sentences’ (393–416) with underlying states in the logical form. Liina Pylkkänen, in ‘On stativity and causation’ (417–44), providing evidence from Finnish, argues that stativity is compatible with causative semantics. In ‘Events and the semantics of opposition’ (445–82), James Pustejovsky motivates a richer notion of event structure (based on data that mostly involve contradictions of change), namely ‘event persistence structure’. Barbara Partee concludes the volume with ‘Some remarks on linguistic uses of the notion of “Event”’ (483–95).

While it is a shame to read about the caliber of those workshop attendants who couldn’t contribute their papers, the collection here is of very high quality, making the book a wonderful companion on the syntax and semantics of events and beyond.