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CTL5403  SEMANTICS and DISCOURSE

Haihua PAN (Dr.), CTL, CityU., HK

Office: Rm B7610; Phone: 2788 8795; Email:  cthpan@cityu.edu.hk

Sentence Semantics: Situations

1.  Classifying Situations

1.1  Verbs and situation types (Smith 1997: Chapters 2 & 3)

• statives: describe a static or no change situation. Examples include desire, want, love, know, believe, etc.

They include the ascription of concrete and abstract properties of all kinds, possession, location, belief and other mental states, dispositions, habits, etc.  Verb constellation of posture and location are also stative predicates.

Derived statives include generic sentences such as Tigers are striped and Tigers eat meat, and habitual sentences which present a pattern of events rather than a specific situation, and denote a state that holds consistently over an interval. Examples: My cat eats mice every day, and Fred frequently walked to school. Also Susan is happy, and Fred plays tennis. Note that in English event sentences with present tense must be interpreted as habitual sentences with or without frequency adverbials. 

• activity: describe an unbounded dynamic situation. Examples: run, walk, swim, push a cart, drive a car, etc.

        a. processes unlimited in principle, such as sleep, laugh, etc.

        b. processes with indefinite internal stages like eat cherries.

        c. shifted or derived activity.

Activity may involve animate beings and events of movement, activity, and/or volition; weather processes such as raining, snowing; actions such as vibrate, rotate; non-extensional actions such as seek, listen for; physical perception (Dowty 1979).  Sentences with degree predicates may present activity events.

        (1)  a. They are widening the road.

               b. They widened the road.

Since we don't know how wide is wide, the result may still not be wide enough to be called wide. Thus there is no definite result arising from the event described in (1), and it is not an accomplishment but an activity.

        Multi-event activity

        (2)  a. Mary coughed for an hour.

               b. We fed the puppy for an hour.

• accomplishment: describe a bounded dynamic situation. Examples: run a mile, walk to school, build a house, melt, paint a picture, grow up, recover from illness, etc.

a. a process and an outcome or a change of state.  Note that the change is the  completion of the process.

        b. major types of results

            -- affected object: bend an iron bar, wrinkle a dress.

            -- constructed objects: build a house, write a letter.

            -- consumed objects: destroy a house, drink a glass of wine.

            -- affected experiencers: amuse Mary

            -- path-goal: walk to the lake, work from 2 to 3.

        c. derived accomplishment: processes with independently, explicitly stated bounds.

            We strolled by the river for 2 hours.

            Sam worked from 2 to 4 this morning.       

Temporally bounded processes are like telic events in having specific, finite endpoints. But they are also unlike telic events, because there is no change of state.

• achievement: describe an instantaneous change of state situation. Examples: recognize, find, stop, start, reach the top, win the race, spot someone, etc.

        Major types of results for achievement

        -- affected object: break a cup, tear a paper.

        -- constructed objects: imagine a city, define a parameter.

         -- consumed objects: explode a bomb.

         -- affected experiencers: see a comet

        -- path-goal: reach the top, arrive in Boston.       

• semelfactive: describe an instantaneous situation that does not involve change of state. It is a single stage event without result or outcome, and thus is intrinsically bounded.   Examples: knock, cough, bang, slap, etc. They can be repeated, and thus are compatible with for-phrases such as John coughed for 5 minutes.

• Classification in terms of features [ątelic], [ądynamic], [ądurative].

	dynamic	telic	durative
states	-	-	-
activity	+	-	+
accomplishment	+	+	+
achievement	+	+	-
semelfactive	+	-	-

• Internal structures of different situation types:

        States:                     (I) --------------- (F)

        Activity:                   I ---- /////// ---- (F)

        Accomplishment:     I ---- /////// ----  F

        Achievement:           ER

        Semelfactive            E

Sometimes one says that accomplishment has a natural final endpoint, called Fnat, while activity has an arbitrary final endpoint, called Farb.

 

                 Fig. 1 Classification of situation types

• Tests for different situation types.

        In-/for-phrases distinguish activity from accomplishment.

        (3) a.   John painted three pictures in an hour.

              b. *John painted three pictures for an hour.

        Entailment of activity sentences:

        (4) John ran for five minutes ---> John ran for two minutes

                                                      ---> John ran for three minutes.

        (5) a. The kitten was chasing its tail.

              b. The kitten chased its tail.                                     
              (a) entails (b), but not vice versa.

         Accomplishment sentences are ambiguous with 'almost'.

        (6) John almost opened the door.

                a. John didn't quite get to the door

                b. John didn't quite get the door open (only half-way).

        Entailment of accomplishment sentences:

        (7) a. John built a cabin last summer.

              b. John was building a cabin last summer.                 
              (a) entails (b) but not vice versa.

Entailment of stative sentences:   When a state holds for an interval, it also holds for every sub-interval of that interval.

• Situation types are determined not only by verbs but also by their arguments.        

        Examples: eat an apple (accomplishment)

                         eat apples (activity)

        The above example shows that objects influence the situation type of sentences.

        Examples: Tourists visited this place for years.

                         *Tourists visited this place in a year.

The above example suggests that different subjects may lead to different situations. Since the IN-phrase is only compatible with accomplishment but not with activity, "tourists visited this place" has the activity as its situation type.

References

Dowty, David (1979) Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Jiang, Yan and Haihua Pan (1998) Introduction to Formal Semantics, China Social Sciences Publishing House, Beijing, China.

Saeed, John (1997) Semantics. Blackwell.

Smith, Carlota (1997) The Parameter of Aspect. 2nd edition, Kluwer Academic Publishers.