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AG Audience

English

60 Minutes

Saarbrücken

In this talk I will present a novel theory of Aktionsarten (or actionality)
which tries to interpret literally the assumption according to which telic
verbs are constituted by an initial change and a resulting state. Thus a
theory of event structure is presented, where two primitive classes of
events are assumed, i.e. atomic changes and atomic states. Atomic changes
and atomic states are organized so as to form complex situations (cf.
Krifka 1989). We can join two or more atomic situations and obtain a new
situation. For instance, by joining a set of atomic changes which are
changes of "running" a larger (non-atomic) situation which is again a
"running" is obtained. And, by joining this non-atomic situation with the
state denoted by "being at home", a situation which is in the denotation of
the predicate "running home" is obtained. All situations in a world are in
one way or another a composition ("join") of subsets of the set of atomic
situations.

Traditional Vendlerian classes are thus defined as the composition of

atomic situations (Pustejovsky 1988). Activities are the join of non
singleton sets of atomic changes, states are the join of non singleton sets
of atomic states, achievements are the join of an atomic change and a
state, accomplishments are the join of an activity and a state.

As we will see compelling evidence for such an organization comes not only
from facts concerning temporal modification, but also from the syntactic
realization of the argumental structure in natural languages.

There is a paper I wrote together with my advisor that gives an idea of
what I am going to say which is available through anonymous ftp. It can
befound at "alphalinguistica.sns.it" in
/pub/outgoing/dini/dini-bertinetto-on-punctuals.ps.gz.

Werner Saurer

+49 (681) 302-4177

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