The Normal Course of Events

Abstract

This is the second volume of three in the Structuring Sense series. This three-volume book sets out to demonstrate 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 important implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about the human mind and language. The book 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. This volume 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 this volume 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.