Truswell Robert (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Event Structure

Oxford University Press Press, 2019. — 1068 p.This handbook deals with research into the nature of events, and how we use language to describe events. The study of event structure over the past 60 years has been one of the most successful areas of lexical semantics, uniting insights from morphology and syntax, lexical and compositional semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence to develop insightful theories of events and event descriptions. This volume provides accessible introductions to major topics and ongoing debates in event structure research, exploring what events are, how we perceive them, how we reason with them, and the role they play in the organization of grammar and discourse. The chapters are divided into four parts: the first covers metaphysical issues related to events; the second is concerned with the relationship between event structure and grammar; the third is a series of crosslinguistic case studies; and the fourth deals with links to cognitive science and artificial intelligence more broadly.The book is strongly interdisciplinary in nature, with insights from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science, and will appeal to a wide range of researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards.List of Figures and Tables
List of Abbreviations
List of ContributorsIntroduction
Robert TruswellEvents and Natural Language Metaphysics
Aspectual classes
Anita MittwochEvents and states
Claudia MaienbornEvent composition and event individuation
Robert TruswellThe semantic representation of causation and
Agentivity
Richmond H. ThomasonForce dynamics
Bridget CopleyEvent structure without naïve physics
Henk J. VerkuylEvent kinds
Berit GehrkeEvent in Morphosyntax and Lexical Semantics
Thematic roles and events
Nikolas Gisborne and James DonaldsonSemantic domains for syntactic word-building
Lisa LevinsonNeodavidsonianism in semantics and syntax
Terje LohndalEvent structure and verbal decomposition
Gillian RamchandNominals and event structure
Friederike MoltmannAdjectives and event structure
Rebekah Baglini and Christopher KennedyCrosslinguistic Perspectives
Lexicalization patterns
Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport HovavSecondary predication
Tova RapoportEvent structure and syntax
Tal SiloniInner aspect crosslinguistically
Lisa deMena TravisPart IV Events, Cognition, and Computation Tense and aspect in Discourse Representation
Theory
Hans KampCoherence relations
Andrew KehlerForm-independent meaning representation for eventualities
Mark SteedmanThe neurophysiology of event processing in language and visual events
Neil Cohn and Martin PaczynskiReferences
Index