Event Structure

The paper deals with the semantics of complex verb constructions in Hill Mari language. We show that different verb telicizers can be distinguished by their semantic features and suggest that the set of interpretations imposed by a light verb can be predicted on the base of the event structure of the verbal stem which gave rise to a light verb. In our theory, light verbs can be represented as bundles of several features which contribute to the meaning of the stem/lexical verb. The talk was presented at SLE 2018.

Previous studies carried out on sign languages have
researched classifier predicates, whereas this study is
researching whether the verb’s lexically portray an event
structure. This study aims to determine whether it is the parametrical speciality emerging because of the modality of signed languages that enable this to happen or that there is a need for an extended definition of the Ground component. Two-handed lexical verb signs have been observed and the structures of such motion events were examined within the framework of Tang & Yang (2007)’s model on sign languages. The study is limited to the two-handed lexical verb’s, which were chosen from within the most common 2000 words in The Contemporary Turkish Sign Language Dictionary (Makaroğlu & Dikyuva, 2017).

This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme -le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme -zhe. The perfective morpheme -le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme -zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing. We were interested to see whether young children are able to use the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes (i.e., completed versus ongoing) as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we tested 34 Mandarin-speaking adults and 99 Mandarin-speaking children (35 three-year-olds, 32 four-year-olds and 32 five-year-olds). On each trial, participants were presented with spoken sentences containing either of the two aspectual morphemes while viewing a visual image containing two pictures, one representing a completed event and one representing an ongoing event. Participants' eye movements were recorded from the onset of the spoken sentences. The results show that both the adults and the three age groups of children exhibited a facilitatory effect trigged by the aspectual morpheme: hearing the perfective morpheme -le triggered more eye movements to the completed event area, whereas hearing the durative morpheme -zhe triggered more eye movements to the ongoing event area. This effect occurred immediately after the onset of the aspectual morpheme, both for the adults and the three groups of children. This is evidence that young children are able to use the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition. Children's eye movement patterns reflect a rapid mapping of grammatical aspect onto the temporal structures of events depicted in the visual scene.

In addition to information about phonology, morphology and syntax, lexical entries contain semantic information about participants (e.g., Agent). However, the traditional criteria for determining how much participant information is lexically encoded have proved unreliable. We have proposed two semantic criteria (obligatoriness and selectivity) that jointly identify the participants that are lexically encoded in verbs. We tested whether one of these criteria, semantic selectivity, makes psychologically real distinctions between participant information that is lexically encoded and participant information that is not. We examined how readers integrated syntactically optional WH-constituents in filler-gap sentences when the participant information conveyed by the WH-filler was specific to a restricted class of verbs (i.e., source locations) and when it was not (i.e., event locations). Our results provide support for the role of specificity in the lexical encoding of participant information of syntactically optional constituents.

Published in Morphology and its Relations to Phonology and Syntax, eds. Lapointe, S.G, D. K. Brentenari and P. M Farrell, Stanford: CSLI publications, 1998.

It presents an earlier execution of what, some years later, was published as a book, Borer (2005) The Normal Course of Events.

A study of early child language use of argument structure reveals a preference for structure over word meaning, supporting a syntactic, rather than semantic bootstrapping approach to acquisition, and a constructivist approach to the construction of event structure in both adults and children.

In A. Alexiadou, E. Anagnostopoulou and M. Everaert, eds. The Unaccusative Puzzle, Oxford University Press.

In the Romance context, Sicilian rather unusually allows finite verbs to be governed by a preposition within a subordinate phrasal constituent expressing purpose. In other Romance languages, the verb slotted in this context is normally an infinitive. Sicilian also has the corresponding infinitive construction, and the distribution of these two functionally equivalent structures in a corpus of Sicilian folk tales is analysed, revealing overall conciseness conditions restricting the occurrence of the finite-verb construction. The two structures are then analysed from a semantic and syntactic point of view, employing the formalism of Role and Reference Grammar, in order to understand what distinguishes them in terms of event structure and its expression via core complementation vs. adjunction.

This dissertation is a study of metaphor in usage: metaphor in language, metaphor in gesture, and how they interact. Gesture provides a route to study both the cognition associated with language and the domain-generality of cognitive processes. While English speakers may be producing metaphoric manner verbs due to the lexicalization patterns of their language, are they necessarily thinking in terms of metaphoric manner? This is difficult to judge when looking at language alone. To answer this question, we turn to metaphoric gesture.

Metaphoric gestures, in which the gesture represents the source domain of a conceptual metaphor, are well-known but under-studied (Cienki and Müller, 2008b). Iconic gestures conveying information about a motion event are known to interact with the syntactic and semantic structure of speech; speakers of languages that express manner of motion in the verb gesture differently than speakers of languages that primarily express path of motion in the verb. Metaphoric usages of motion in language – prices falling, hopes rising, time flying – also interact with the grammatical patterns of language. However, we know little about how metaphoric motion in gesture interacts with grammar.

In Part One of the dissertation, I focus on metaphor in language. In Chapter 2 I propose to represent metaphors as a complex network of frames, mappings, and bindings as implemented in the MetaNet Metaphor Repository (Dodge et al., 2015). This advances the representation of conceptual metaphors to a level that interfaces more accurately with representations of frames and constructions in FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al., 2006) and Embodied Construction Grammar (Bergen and Chang, 2005). In turn, this enables the detailed analysis of metaphors and metaphor systems, as exemplified by the Location Event Structure Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) case study in Chapter 3. This corpus-based study is one of the first to make use of the MetaNet method for large-scale automatic metaphor identification and annotation. This approach reveals not only how the metaphor system is evoked in language, but further illustrates the conceptual structure of the metaphor. I demonstrate that although English, as a satellite-framed language, privileges manner in its lexicalization of motion events, metaphoric English motion backgrounds manner and foregrounds path. The foregrounding of path information in linguistic realization of metaphoric motion runs counter to the privileging of manner in English lexicalization patterns. This finding lays the groundwork for the investigation of the same metaphor system in gesture.

In Part Two, I focus on metaphor in co-speech gesture. I investigate metaphoric motion-evoking metaphoric gestures using two complementary approaches. Chapter 4 uses a corpus approach; I analyze a parallel corpus of video gesture data in which speakers use a motion verb either literally or metaphorically in their speech while producing a co-expressive representational gesture. To analyze the corpora, I develop a set of annotation guidelines and then demonstrate the benefits of taking an image-schematic approach to gesture analysis. I argue that the image schema is the most appropriate level of structure in analyzing the form and meaning of metaphoric gestures. Results of this image schema analysis suggest that, reflecting the English language data in Chapter 3, these metaphoric gestures emphasize path and do not represent the manner of motion.

Chapter 5 is the first study to take an experimental approach to metaphoric gesture that uses non-metaphoric stimuli. Participants were given short stories about state change, such as prices decreasing or grades improving, to read and re-tell to a friend; half of the stimuli contained metaphoric language and half did not. Results from this study demonstrated the viability of this methodology in eliciting both metaphoric speech and gesture, and supported those of Chapter 4. I find that speakers are more likely produce metaphoric gestures if they are also producing metaphoric language – even if the gesture evokes a different metaphor than the speech does.

I unify my analyses of metaphoric motion in speech and gesture in a multi-modal Embodied Construction Grammar analysis of both co-expressive and complementary metaphoric co-speech gestures. I represent both the meaning and form of the gesture and the meaning and form of the speech including frame structure, argument structure, and metaphoric structure. This analysis provides the first formal representation of a multi-modal utterance in a construction grammar and an innovative approach to the unification of the construction of multi-modal meaning.

The paper deals with the verbal suffix -nda with the meaning of “motion-cum-purpose” (‘to go to do V’)
in Nanai. The discussion of crosslinguistic relevance of the motion-cum-purpose category is focused on the
data of Nanai, and particularly on the possibility of morphological expression of this meaning without combination
with any spatial meaning (including deictic ones ‘here’ / ‘there’). The event structure of the verb
marked by the affix of motion-cum-purpose is also discussed, especially its argument structure — the expression
of both arguments of the initial verb and arguments of the motion verb. Different results are revealed for the finite use of the nda-verb and for the pleonastic construction “converb-nda + motion verb”. The first
one behaves rather like expressing one single event of motion-cum-purpose, while the second one gives evidence
for the bieventual interpretation and shows both features of bi- and monoclausality.

Juwon Lee. 2016. Some Activity Predicates as Accomplishments. Language and Information 20.2, 117-143. In this paper I argue that some "activity" predicates in Korean are actually a kind of accomplishment rather than activity, unlike English counterparts. As evidence for this recategorization, failed attempt interpretation, ambiguity with in-adverbial or keuy 'almost', and non-ambiguity with tasi 'again' are discussed. This type of accomplishment is called activity-accomplishment here and this accomplishment analysis is extended to other kinds of "activity" verbs in Korean, manner of speaking verbs and perception verbs. I also show that in addition to lexical activity-accomplishment, some derived activity-accomplishments involving resultative or causative constructions support the existence of activity-accomplishment in Korean. (Kyung Hee University)

The present study investigated the production of grammatical morphemes by Mandarin-speaking children with high functioning autism. Previous research found that a subgroup of English-speaking children with autism exhibit deficits in the use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense. In order to see whether this impairment in grammatical morphology can be generalised to children with autism from other languages, the present study examined whether or not high-functioning Mandarin-speaking children with autism also exhibit deficits in using grammatical morphemes that mark aspect. The results show that Mandarin-speaking children with autism produced grammatical morphemes significantly less often than age-matched and IQ-matched TD peers as well as MLU-matched TD peers. The implications of these findings for understanding the grammatical abilities of children with autism were discussed.

This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme -le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme -zhe. The perfective morpheme -le is often used to indicate that an event has been completed, whereas the durative morpheme -zhe indicates that an event is still in progress or continuing. We were interested to see whether young children are able to use the temporal reference encoded in the two aspectual morphemes (i.e., completed versus ongoing) as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we tested 34 Mandarin-speaking adults and 99 Mandarin-speaking children (35 three-year-olds, 32 four-year-olds and 32 five-year-olds). On each trial, participants were presented with spoken sentences containing either of the two aspectual morphemes while viewing a visual image containing two pictures, one representing a completed event and one representing an ongoing event. Participants' eye movements were recorded from the onset of the spoken sentences. The results show that both the adults and the three age groups of children exhibited a facilitatory effect trigged by the aspectual morpheme: hearing the perfective morpheme -le triggered more eye movements to the completed event area, whereas hearing the durative morpheme -zhe triggered more eye movements to the ongoing event area. This effect occurred immediately after the onset of the aspectual morpheme, both for the adults and the three groups of children. This is evidence that young children are able to use the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes as rapidly as adults to facilitate event recognition. Children's eye movement patterns reflect a rapid mapping of grammatical aspect onto the temporal structures of events depicted in the visual scene.

The present study demonstrates that children experience difficulties reaching the correct situation model of multiple events described in temporal sentences if the sentences encode language-external events in reverse chronological order. Importantly, the timing of the cue of how to organize these events is crucial: When temporal subordinate conjunctions (before/after) or converb constructions that carry information of how to organize the events were given sentence-medially, children experienced severe difficulties in arriving at the correct interpretation of event order. When this information was provided sentence-initially, children were better able to arrive at the correct situation model, even if it required them to decode the linguistic information reversely with respect to the actual language external events. This indicates that children even aged 8 –12 still experience difficulties in arriving at the correct interpretation of the event structure, if the cue of how to order the events is not given immediately when they start building the representation of the situation. This suggests that children's difficulties in comprehending sequential temporal events are caused by their inability to revise the representation of the current event structure at the level of the situation model.