Introduction

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract / Description of output

This introduction summarizes the major pieces of research that laid the foundations for the current field of event structure. It discusses three leading ideas from the 1950s and 1960s: (1) many sentences have a covert event argument (Davidson); (2) event descriptions can be divided into classes according to their aspectual properties (Vendler); (3) apparently lexical meaning is partly a product of compositional processes involving operators like CAUSE and BECOME (Lakoff, McCawley). These ideas became intertwined during the 1970s–90s, laying out the terrain for today’s event-structural research. This chapter also summarizes the contents of the handbook, and relationships between the chapters.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationOxford Handbook of Event Structure
EditorsRobert Truswell
PublisherOxford University Press
Chapter1
Pages1-28
Number of pages28
ISBN (Print)9780199685318
Publication statusPublished - 22 Mar 2019

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • event structure
  • event argument
  • aspectual class
  • lexical decomposition
  • lexical conceptual structure

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