Sem: Verb Mean Event Struct

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This seminar will introduce current developments in the study of theories of event structure and verb meaning. The central problem we will be considering will be the relationship between ‘verbs’, and the event structure of the phrase/clause. We will make particular use of syntactic and morphological evidence to examine this question. The first part of the semester will introduce some foundational ideas. In the second part we will go through some individual case studies that illustrate the main views posited in recent work, or that motivate, extend, or adapt those views. Representative phenomena that we will look at include derived states, resultative predication, causation, and possession. The course will be project oriented: the goal is to get participants engaged in producing research projects that apply recent theoretical insights and questions introduced in the first part of the semester to novel data sets. The aim is that the last part of the course will go in some new directions, based on student interests/projects.