How Do We Match Verbs and Times? Event Semantics
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- Опубліковано 10 вер 2024
- How do events factor into our mental linguistics? How can we adjust our logic to capture different sentence permutations? In this week's episode, we take a look at event semantics: what problems they're meant to solve, how they help us limit time and place in our sentences, and what evidence we have that events are real.
This is Topic #92!
This week's tag language: Tswana!
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Last episode:
Bending the Truth: The Linguistics of Propaganda and Censorship - • How Do We Bend the Tru...
Other of our semantics videos:
Downward Spiral: Negative Polarity Items - • Why Can't "Any" Go Jus...
Topic of Focus: Information Structure - • How Do We Signal What'...
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - • How Do We Decide What'...
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on different kinds of events, at: www.thelingspac...
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Davidson's original paper on event semantics: verbs.colorado....
A useful handout that gets into the entailment patterns: people.umass.ed...
A handy and short summary of the topic: semanticsarchiv...
Looking forward to next time!
If you want to model verbs as predicates, you can still get very far. As long as you accept that the types of arguments might imply different semantics. For example: Jane grieved for many years. vs Jane grieved the death of her cat. The first predicate takes a subject (nominative) and a modifier, and the second takes a subject and an object (both nominatives). In English these seem like two different type signatures for a polymorphic predicate. However, since they are always syntactically different, we might imagine that in some other language, the two verbs are different such as grieve vs begrieve.
Oh my, this is some food for thought
I'm only at introductory level in logic so that might contribute to it, but this idea is pretty mind blowing to me, like, this Davidson guy definitely has a point
Great video as always :)
Thanks so much for the kind words! We do have a bunch of other videos building up to this one with the logic, which may help. But Davidson did have some very good insights here. ^_^
Oh my goodness.
I used to have a conlang I worked one that was VSO and the stem of the verb was always capitalized (prefixes, not).
But that makes sense. I hope it continues to work out.
I do sometimes wonder if prepositional phrases and some cases could be seen as special kinds of adverbs.
O.K. What language is that, what's the perspective and what am I supposed to understand from the article?
Ah! That makes sense. Dependency seems to have a lot to offer.
Amazing work as always. Good little gymnastics for the brain.
I was wondering how we could interpret the classic "A person is run over every 5 minutes" according to that. Due to the habitual aspect of the verb, it doesn't refer to a single punctual event, and we don't have a way to know if that person is the same in every iteration, hence the double meaning of the sentence.
[def] LORD.[sg] RETURN.[3sg.archaic]
Haha, thanks. That's very kind of you, and much appreciated. We're looking forward to getting back to a more regular schedule pretty soon. ^_^
You're welcome!
Say, have you ever done a video on why SOV and SVO word orders are so common, why that famous ratio of the frequency of the six possible word orders is the way it is, what brings it about? I mean, the patterns suggest that, when humans are developing a language, their priorities tend to be:
1) Put the subject before the object (almost always)
2) Put the subject before the verb (most of the time)
3) Eh, do whatever with the object and the verb (50/50 -- well, 55/45)
So, why might the subject receive such special attention? And what's up with the slight popularity of VSO in this?
The Lord Returneth
Woo you're back!
Yep! We're looking forward to getting back into more of a regular groove again soon. We've got some interesting stuff on pronouns and on articulatory phonetics coming up soon. ^_^
schmerzlich willkommen
I got distracted by the looper blue ray.
It is admittedly pretty distracting.
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I don't really get why we should turn sentences into over generalized math statements and I especially don't get why we need to turn "Katrina grieved" into anything when we have descriptive language to talk about language already