Lexical semantics, syntax, and event structure (review)

This volume consists of a diverse set of papers presented at a workshop held in 2006 in honor of Anita Mittwoch for the occasion of her eightieth birthday. The workshop was entitled 'Syntax, lexicon, and event structure', and was themed to relate to Mittwoch's work on event temporality and its relation to syntax and the lexicon. One can view the sequence of three parts as building a path from analyzing the atomic elements of event descriptions up to investigating the interaction of larger constituents at the phrasal level. The variety of the articles accurately reflects the range of empirical issues and theoretical approaches in the field.

The introduction to the volume makes an impressive attempt at offering a background for the wide range of chapters that follow. It includes a section that lays out the general path of the volume and another that summarizes each of the articles, occasionally relating them to one another. Given the diversity of the empirical coverage of the chapters, there is not much comparison of analyses of the same phenomena, just as in the chapters themselves there is not much referencing of other chapters. The editors conclude the chapter with a tribute to Anita Mittwoch, reviewing her academic contributions and drawing connections between her work and that of several of the contributors to the volume.

Part 1, 'Lexical representation', is relevant in that such representations play a role in shaping event descriptions. In Ch. 2, 'Reflections on manner/result complementarity', Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin argue that event structures are constrained such that they may have roots that are manner or result, but not both at the same time. By 'root' they mean the core lexical content of the word, as divorced from structural properties associated with it in a specific event structure or syntactic context. They argue that their explanation for this complementarity provides insight into the nature of event structures more broadly. In Ch. 3, 'Verbs, constructions, and semantic frames', Adele Goldberg argues that no such manner/result complementarity exists as a constraint on verbs or event structure. She argues from a construction-grammar perspective that the primary constraint on possible event structures encoded by verbs is what she calls the conventional frame constraint. This constraint does not depend on root types in the way that Rappaport Hovav and Levin's analysis does; rather Goldberg posits that a verb meaning is possible so long as it describes events that form a coherent semantic frame. Like Rappaport Hovav and Levin, Nomi Erteschik-Shir and Tova Rapoport, in Ch. 4, 'Contact and other results', make use of root types to account for the distribution of roots across different event structures and argument structures. Their approach is more syntactically oriented than that of Rappaport Hovav and Levin, in the spirit of Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser. More specifically, they propose atom theory, whereby alternations with contact verbs arise from a combination of the meaning of the root and the interpretation of the structure in which the root is embedded. The final paper in Part 1, Ch. 5, 'The lexical encoding of idioms' by Martin Everaert, does not focus directly on the types (or lack thereof) of roots. Instead, Everaert approaches the lexicon from the perspective of idiom interpretation.

Part 2, 'Argument structure and the compositional construction of predicates', includes papers that focus on syntactically and semantically larger or 'higher' elements, such as heads introducing external arguments and causativity. In Ch. 6, 'The emergence of argument structure in two new sign languages', Irit Meir demonstrates, based on Israeli Sign Language, that marking argument structure for polyadic predicates with verb agreement does not require an earlier stage of the language where it is indicated with word order. This is a new finding, as work on the development of spoken languages has suggested...