this paper. Since transitive verbs necessarily have objects, a challenge for theories of transitivity is how to deal with the just-mentioned problems involving the semantic correlates of objecthood. In this paper I revisit these issues from a novel perspective, showing that the notion `object' of a transitive verb can be fruitfully explored in the context of recent work on the structure and representation of verb meaning and the licensing of arguments. Much recent research has converged on the notion `event' as an important organizing notion in the linguistic representation of meaning, and the grammatically-relevant component of a representation of verb meaning is now often called an `event structure' because its form is determined by the basic event type of the verb. I suggest that two distinct event structures can give rise to objects: a complex, causative event structure and a simple event structure. I argue that these two sources for objects shed light on some of the well-known challenges associated with the semantic underpinnings of objecthood. I use the transitive verbs of English to make these points, although I believe that the results of this research will largely generalize across languages (see section 4). 1. The `other' transitive verbs

In this article we develop a semantic typology of gradable predicates, with special emphasis on deverbal adjectives. We argue for the linguistic relevance of this typology by demonstrating that the distribution and interpretation of degree modifiers is sensitive to its two major classificatory parameters: (1) whether a gradable predicate is associated with what we call an open or closed scale, and (2) whether the standard of comparison for the applicability of the predicate is absolute or relative to a context. We further showthat the classification of an important subclass of adjectives within the typology is largely predictable. Specifically, the scale structure of a deverbal gradable adjective correlates either with the algebraic part structure of the event denoted by its source verb or with the part structure of the entities to which the adjective applies. These correlations underscore the fact that gradability is characteristic not only of adjectives but also of verbs and nouns, and that scalar properties are shared by categorially distinct but derivationally related expressions.* 1. DEGREE MODIFICATION IN DEVERBAL GRADABLE ADJECTIVES. Among the many observations made in Bolinger’s (1972) classic study of degree expressions in English, two stand out. First, degree modifiers in English have distributions that cannot be given

We challenge the predominant view of the English dative alternation, which takes all alternating verbs to have two meanings: a caused possession meaning realized by the double object variant and a caused motion meaning realized by the to variant. Instead, we argue that verbs like give and sell only have a caused possession meaning, while verbs like throw and send have both caused motion and caused possession meanings. We show that the caused possession meaning may be realized by both variants. Concomitantly, we argue that verbs like give, even in the to variant, lack a conceptual path constituent, and instead have a caused possession meaning which can be understood as the bringing about of a ‘have ’ relation. We reassess evidence for alternative approaches adduced from inference patterns and verb–argument combinations and demonstrate how our verb-sensitive analysis, when combined with an account of variant choice, provides a more insightful explanation of this data, while having wider coverage. Our investigation affirms proposals that a verb’s own meaning plays a key role in determining its argument realization options. To conclude, we consider the crosslinguistic implications of our study, attempting to explain why so

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In this paper I examine the aspectual behavior of dynamic predicates, i.e. predicates that involve some “change ” or potential change in one participant, including change-of-state, motion, and consumption/destruction predicates. I focus on the factors governing durativity in dynamic predicates, which I

interests focus on morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics, particularly from the perspectives of Distributed Morphology and Hale and Keyser’s l-syntax. Recent publications include ‘A feature-geometric approach to person and number’, in Language with Elizabeth Ritter, and

Current theories of aspect acknowledge the pervasiveness of verbs of variable telicity, and are designed to account both for why these verbs show such variability and for the complex conditions that give rise to telic and atelic interpretations. Previous work has identified several sets of such verbs, including incremental theme verbs,

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This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of the English resultative construction that crucially models telicity (aspectual boundedness) in terms of the event-argument homomorphism model (Krifka, 1998, inter alia) rather than the commonly assumed result state model (Dowty, 1979). This assumption, together with recent insights on the semantics of scalar adjectives (Hay et al., 1999; Kennedy, 1999; Kennedy and McNally, 1999), leads us to an explanation for a myriad of facts. Corpus data from Boas (2000) strongly support our conclusions. The central idea of this analysis is that resultatives involve an abstract ‘path’ argument corresponding to degrees along the scale denoted by the resultative predicate. This approach is broadly consonant with conclusions reached independently in other recent work. This independent evidence includes the cross-linguistic parallels between resultatives and locative paths observed by Beck and Snyder (2001); Vanden Wyngaerd’s

this paper, we pursue a constructionalist-type explanation of the alternation we discuss in section 3 because we agree with the fundamental constructionalist hypothesis on the decomposition of meaning in the syntax. Our motivation for pursuing this kind of approach is both theoretical and empirical. Starting from the theoretical strength of a syntax-based approach, it has been shown that there are a number of syntactic phenomena that a lexicalist approach has difficulty explaining (see for example Rosen 1984 for a discussion of the phenomenon of unstable valency of unaccusative/unergative verbs or Hoekstra and Mulder (1990) on the alternating behaviour of motion verbs in Italian and Dutch). It is even more implausible that all the syntactic correlates of the unaccusative/unergative distinction (ne-cliticization, auxiliary selection, availability of resulative construction, er-nominalisation in English, and possessor datives in Hebrew etc