Graduate Seminar
Each year, the Sag Fellow also holds a graduate seminar. The 2023 Sag Fellow, Professor John Beavers, will hold a seminar on lexical aspect, details below.
Please note: The seminar is open to all UR graduate students and faculty, as well as any graduate students or faculty from other institutions who wish to make the trip in person. It is not open to the general public. There will be no hybrid option.
Location
Gamble Room • Rush-Rhees Library • University of Rochester
Time
Wednesdays 1:30-3pm • October 4/11/18
Lexical Aspect, Word Categories, and Argument Realization
John Beavers
In this seminar I explore some issues in theories of the lexical
aspect of change of state expressions, including the semantic
ingredients needed for such a theory and how lexical aspect relates to
grammar. Each week I’ll focus on a different ongoing project that
touches on various boundary cases of such a theory. I assume a
framework that treats change of state as scalar in nature: change is
modeled as holding different degrees of some property along a scale of
such degrees as the event progresses (Hay et al. 19991, Kennedy and
Levin 2008). The aspectual properties of scalar predicates are derived
from incremental relationships between the event and the scale of
change as well as the mereological properties of the object (Beavers
2012). One case study will explore the verb classes that show middle
voice in English, and how they point to a theory of degrees of
affectedness (qua how much change something undergoes in an event)
that has far more categories than previous approaches have typically
assumed. Another case study will explore how verb meanings are related
to their corresponding adjectives and how much scalar information is
shared by the shared morphological root and how much comes from how
the two categories are built. I’ll suggest that nearly all aspects of
the scalar semantics of adjectives and verbs comes from the shared
root. The lexical category simply determines whether degrees on the
scale are being compared across times (for verbs) or at a single time
(for adjectives). Finally, I’ll present a very tentative exploration
of what happens when change-of-state verbs describe changes that are
not temporal in nature, such as change along a spatial region or
across a population of individuals. Building on Gawron (2006) and
Koontz-Garboden (2010), I’ll suggest that such changes are still the
same sort one finds with temporal change, with the only difference
being the axis along which change occurs. The aspectual properties of
such verb uses the same as with temporal change (Beavers 2011), with
any apparent differences instead to do with pragmatics, and not deeper
lexical semantic differences.