Dynamic Argument Structure

LiLT volume 15, issue 3 2017 Dynamic Argument Structure Elisabetta Jezek, Universit`a di Pavia, James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University This paper presents a new classification of verbs of change and modification, proposing a dynamic interpretation of the lexical semantics of the predicate and its arguments. Adopt- ing the model of dynamic event structure proposed in Puste- jovsky (2013), and extending the model of dynamic selection outlined in Pustejovsky and Jezek (2011), we define a verb class in terms of its Dynamic Argument Structure (DAS), a representation which encodes how the participants involved in the change behave as the event unfolds. We address how the logical resources and results of change predicates are real- ized syntactically, if at all, as well as how the exploitation of the resource results in the initiation or termination of a new object, i.e. the result. We show how DAS can be associated with a dynamically encoded event structure representation, which measures the change making reference to a scalar com- ponent, modelled in terms of assignment and/or testing of values of attributes of participants. 1.1 Introduction In this paper we discuss the patterns in language that are exploited for expressing the semantics of change. We present a classification of change predicates based on a number of syntactic and semantic behav- iors involving three semantic parameters: the nature of how the change is measured; the nature of the event capturing the change; and the nature of the change in the participants relative to the event itself. The kinds of change we will examine in this paper encompass those expressed by both creation and destruction predicates, i.e., predicates that denote the “coming into being” (create and make) and the “going out of being” (disappear and die) of an entity. The first systematic classification of change, what Aristotle calls 1 2 / LiLT volume 15, issue 3 2017 “generation and corruption” in de Generatione (McKeon, 1968), can be summarized as follows: (1) Coming into Being: a. The creation of an object through exploitation of resource: - natural growth - aggregation - manipulation of resource; b. The creation of something through the representation of a resource. (2) Going out of Being: The destruction of an object into existing material - disaggregation - termination. Both creation and destruction verbs have long posed a problem for linguistic classification (see Dowty, 1991, Tenny, 1994, among others) and the interplay between their event structure, and the syntactic ex- pressibility of their arguments is still not well understood (Jezek, 2014). Creation verbs, for example, exhibit considerable variation in the syntactic realization of the created entity. This is illustrated in the examples below, where we see that, depending on the predicate, the argument role realizing the created object may be: optional (as in 3); mandatory (as in 4); subcategorized as object only (as in 5); as PP only (as in 6); as object or PP (as in 7); or remain hidden as an entailed inference of the sentence (i.e., the resulting photograph in (8)) while still playing …

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