LSA.133 | The Syntax of Events

Hagit Borer
TR 2:55-4:35
location: 32-155
course web site: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~borer/LSA

In the type of lexicon proposed in Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and "Remarks on Nominalizations" (1970), as well as in the "lexicalist" models that emerged in the '70s and '80s, a large role is played by listed (arbitrary) information in the lexical entries of (substantive) items. Such information could include all or some of the following:

a. The sound-meaning pair
b. Syntactic category
c. Syntactic insertion frame (subcatgorization)
d. Thematic roles
e. Derivational affixation
f. Inflectional affixation

At the same time, however, research during the same decades also attempted to reduce the amount of arbitrary information in the lexicon by deriving at least some of the properties in (a-f) from other components of the computational system. The purpose of this class will be to investigate argument structure and event structure, with a particular focus on the following:

A. A review of the history of projecting argument structure from the lexicon (with a special focus on UTAH )
B. The investigation of the possibility of having a highly impoverished lexicon, restricted to (1a), and deriving everything else from (various) computational systems.
C. Postulate functional structures which are semantically motivated, and which obviate the need for both lexical listing and type shifting.

This class will investigate this issue from the perspective of event structure. Topics discussed will be:

a. The lexical inventory: functional vs. substantive elements
b. Functional structure - its properties, its role, its interpretation.
c. Licensing Phrase Structure within the predicate
d. The building blocks of event structure
e. Do events decompose?
f. The syntax and semantics of quantity (aka telicity)
g. The (a)syntax and (a)semantics of non-quantity (aka atelicity)
h. Accusative and Partitive and the projection of event structure
i. Is Slavic Perfective telic?
j. The syntax of the event argument