1. Stage Structure and Stage Salience for Event Semantics
- Author
-
Patrick Caudal, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (LLF UMR7110), Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 (UPD7)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Structures Formelles du Langage (SFL), Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis (UP8)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Lumières (UPL), Kempchinsky, Paula and Slabakova, Roumyana, Roulois, Alexandre, Kempchinsky, Paula and Slabakova, Roumyana, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 (UPD7), and Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis (UP8)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)- Université Paris Lumières, Académie de Créteil, Campus Condorcet (UPLUM)
- Subjects
060201 languages & linguistics ,Structure (mathematical logic) ,Psycholinguistics ,Salience (language) ,Computer science ,Event (relativity) ,Linguistics ,06 humanities and the arts ,0603 philosophy, ethics and religion ,Viewpoints ,Semantics ,Philosophy of Language ,[SHS.LANGUE] Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics ,Focus (linguistics) ,Philosophy ,general ,060302 philosophy ,0602 languages and literature ,[SHS.LANGUE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics ,semantics ,syntax ,ComputingMilieux_MISCELLANEOUS ,Mereology ,Simple (philosophy) - Abstract
It is generally considered at least since Moens and Steedman (1988) that eventualities should be decomposed into sub-eventualities or ‘stages’ (cf. also Parsons, 1990; Smith, 1991; Kamp & Reyle, 1993). Formal models of situation structure seldom pay attention to the ontological status of stages. They are generally content with ascribing some simple mereological structure to reified situations (if they follow Davidson, 1967, and Bach, 1986) or with representing them in terms of sequences of instants or more abstract indices (cf. e.g., Partee, 1973; Verkuyl, 1993). Pustejovsky (1995) and de Swart (1998) are notable exceptions to this general trend. However, I will suggest here that neither of these two theories can account for phenomena pertaining to what I call stage salience—intuitively, the varying ability of stages to be made ‘visible’ in particular syntactic and semantic contexts. The type of treatment advocated by de Swart is based on the idea that the aspectual contribution of tenses only involves aspectual type shifts, and not aspectual viewpoints, contra e.g., Guillaume (1929) and Smith (1991). Informally, viewpoints operators (unlike aspectual type shift operators) are not just mapping functions between situation types, but rather focus operators (cf. Smith, 1991), which render some parts of a situation structure semantically visible. I will argue that a proper theory of aspect should involve both types of operators. I will show in addition that viewpoint phenomena require non-mereological relations between stages, going against a position defended in Pustejovsky (1995). But before moving to the study of stage salience, I will first propose a formal treatment of situation structure and tense aspectual semantics incorporating the notions of aspectual focus and viewpoint.
- Published
- 2005