At-verbs
In previous posts I discussed the four types of simple events and three types of causation. In the first couple of posts in this series, there are also the location-indicating verbs, which indicate state of affairs - what Delancy [1] calls "AT" and Jackendoff [2] calls "BE". This is the simplest of the basic verb-like relations, and simply asserts that some THEME is located (including metaphorically located) at some location or in some state. BE does not comment on changes of location, it merely asserts the THEME is, at the relevant time, at or in that LOC.
There is a related state of affairs verb: ABSENT (which is short for IS_ABSENT_FROM). Just as AT (or BE) locates a THEME at a LOC, ABSENT merely asserts that it is NOT at the indicated location. As with some of the simple events and causation indicating verbs, ABSENT can be expressed by AT and NOT; but as with those verbs, I find it somewhat clearer to treat this as a separate verb.
These seem to be the only possibilites; either something is in a state or is not. The simple events have these AT-verbs im their meanings: X GOTO Y means that before the event X ABSENT Y, or NOT(X AT Y), and after the event, X AT Y.
Jackendoff, in [2], has a test for the different between a state of affairs (AT (BE), ABSENT) and events (simple events with GOTO, STAY, LEAVE, and AVOID causation events with CAUSE, LET and PREVENT) is that events, but not states, can answer the question "What happened next?" Thus his example (slightly modified here) of "What happened after Stanley found Livingston?" can be answered with event "He remained (STAY) in Africa.", but not with the state *"He was (BE) in Africa."
SO, to recap, there are two AT-type verbs:
THEME AT LOC : the THEME is in/at/located at the state referenced by LOC
THEME ABSENT LOC : the THEME is absent from, or not located in/at, the state referenced by LOC
[1]
Event Construal and Case Role Assignment, in Proc. of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1991), pp. 338-353
[2] Jackendoff, Ray, A System of Semantic Primitives (pdf), in Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, 10-13 June 1975
There is a related state of affairs verb: ABSENT (which is short for IS_ABSENT_FROM). Just as AT (or BE) locates a THEME at a LOC, ABSENT merely asserts that it is NOT at the indicated location. As with some of the simple events and causation indicating verbs, ABSENT can be expressed by AT and NOT; but as with those verbs, I find it somewhat clearer to treat this as a separate verb.
These seem to be the only possibilites; either something is in a state or is not. The simple events have these AT-verbs im their meanings: X GOTO Y means that before the event X ABSENT Y, or NOT(X AT Y), and after the event, X AT Y.
Jackendoff, in [2], has a test for the different between a state of affairs (AT (BE), ABSENT) and events (simple events with GOTO, STAY, LEAVE, and AVOID causation events with CAUSE, LET and PREVENT) is that events, but not states, can answer the question "What happened next?" Thus his example (slightly modified here) of "What happened after Stanley found Livingston?" can be answered with event "He remained (STAY) in Africa.", but not with the state *"He was (BE) in Africa."
SO, to recap, there are two AT-type verbs:
THEME AT LOC : the THEME is in/at/located at the state referenced by LOC
THEME ABSENT LOC : the THEME is absent from, or not located in/at, the state referenced by LOC
[1]
Event Construal and Case Role Assignment, in Proc. of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1991), pp. 338-353
[2] Jackendoff, Ray, A System of Semantic Primitives (pdf), in Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, 10-13 June 1975
Labels: grammar
posted by decaf owl at 12:27 PM
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