Result Stages and the Lexicon: The Proper Treatment of Event Structure

Proceedings of EACL '99 Result Stages and the Lexicon : The Proper Treatment of Event Structure Patrick Caudal TALANA, UFR de Linguistique, Universit~ Paris 7 2, place Jussieu 75251 Paris Cedex 05, FRANCE caudal @linguist.jussieu.fr Abstract I will argue in this paper that the standard notions of affectedness, change-of-state and result state are too coarse-grained, and will revise and enrich substantially their content, increasing their role in a compositional aspect construal procedure. I will claim in particular that a proper theory of event structure requires that enriched result states should be lexically represented, and will base on them a computational treatment of event structure within a feature-structure-based lexicon. Introduction Event structure is traditionally accounted for using two sets of notions : change-of-state / affectedness and incrementality. I will examine both in this paper, determining their respective limitations, before proposing an alternative approach and the formal specifications for a computational implementation. 1 From affectedness to result states: how can we account for event structure .9 1.1 Affectedness, change-of-state and telicity Telic events are generally viewed as an opposition between a previously holding state and a new one, called a result state (e.g. dead(y) for x kills y). They trigger a change-of-state (COS, henceforth), result states (RSs, henceforth) being entailments of CoSs. Moens and Steedman (1988), Smith (1991), Pustejovsky (1995), and others argue that it is a defining property of telic events. They should therefore include an 'undergoer' argument, whose CoS determines the telicity of the event (i.e., it acts as a measuring-out argument). Tenny (1987) thus claims that telic events require such an argument, which she calls an affected argument. Consider for instance John reviewed the paper: as the event reaches its culimation, the affected argument undergoes a CoS (from --,reviewed(paper) to reviewed(paper)), producing a RS. To put it short, the standard theory of event structure says that telicity implies affectedness (and conversely), and that affectedness implies a CoS/RS (and conversely), associating tightly all those notions. Unfortunately, not all measuring-out arguments are affected arguments : ( 1 ) Two men carried Hirsch on the deck. Jackendoff (1996:309) observed that (implicit) paths such as on the deck in (1) are not affected arguments, so that the telicity of such motion events cannot be explained using affectedness, ruling out a unified affectedness-based account of telicityL It follows from this objection that the standard theory should be at least amended. Jackendoff's solution is a general mapping function from measuring-out arguments (seen as paths) to events. It is related to incrementality, which I am discussing below. 1.2 Result states and incrementality Event-object mapping functions, as proposed in Krifka (1992) and Dowty (1991), are another key approach to the treatment of event structure. Dowty (1991) calls an incremental theme any argument I Yet motion verbs could be attributed an affected argument, i.e., their agents, so thatJackendoff's point against affectedness does not seem to be decisive. 233 Proceedings of EACL '99 capable of measuring-out an event. For instance, the drinking event in (2) can be measured along …

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