this paper is to introduce, by means of the detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem, the rudiments of a grammatical theory which assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. 2 This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English as illustrated in (1), and the more idiomatic patterns, such as those exemplified in (2), stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar must provide an account. (1) a What have you done? b Never will I leave you. c So will she. d Long may you prosper! e Had I known, . . . f Am I tired! g . . . as were the others h Thus did the hen reward Beecher. (2) a by and large b [to] have a field day c [to] have to hand it to [someone] d (*A/*The) Fool that I was, . . . e in x's own right Given such a commitment, the construction grammarian is required to develop an explicit system of representation, capable of encoding economically and without loss of generalization, all the constructions (or patterns) of the language, from the most idiomatic to the most general. This goal was advanced in the form of a promissory note in an earlier paper that dealt with the English let alone construction: "It appears to us that the machinery needed for describing the so-called minor or peripheral constructions of the sort which has occupied us here will have 1 The authors gratefully acknowledge much fruitful discussion regarding the content of this paper with Mary Catherine O'Connor. We are indebted to Yunsook Chung, Ron Kaplan, Ray Jackendoff, Susanne Riehemann and Ivan Sag for comments on earlier dr...

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The dynamics model, which is based on L. Talmy’s (1988) theory of force dynamics, characterizes causation as a pattern of forces and a position vector. In contrast to counterfactual and probabilistic models, the dynamics model naturally distinguishes between different cause-related concepts and explains the induction of causal relationships from single observations. Support for the model is provided in experiments in which participants categorized 3-D animations of realistically rendered objects with trajectories that were wholly determined by the force vectors entered into a physics simulator. Experiments 1–3 showed that causal judgments are based on several forces, not just one. Experiment 4 demonstrated that people compute the resultant of forces using a qualitative decision rule. Experiments 5 and 6 showed that a dynamics approach extends to the representation of social causation. Implications for the relationship between causation and time are discussed.

This paper addresses the phenomenon of event composition: the derivation of a single event description expressed in one clause from two lexical heads which could have been used in the description of independent events, each expressed in a distinct clause. In English, this phenomenon is well attested with respect to sentences whose verb is found in combination with an XP describing a result not strictly lexically entailed by this verb, as in (1). (1) The joggers ran the pavement thin. This sentence makes reference to a complex event encompassing an event of running and an event of becoming thin. The lexical heads run and thin appear in a single clause, with the AP appearing as closely bound to the verb in the syntax as subcategorized complements (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995; Tenny 1994; Roberts 1988), justifying the assumption that a single event is made reference to by this sentence. We consider (1) to be an instance of event composition since its verb, run, on its own does not entail a particular result state, and certainly not a result state that does not involve the runner. Furthermore, the components of the event described in this example could have been expressed in separate clauses, as in

This paper examines parallels in semantic structure between noun phrases and verbal predicates in constructions in which they are mutually constraining and contribute to the expression of LEXICAL ASPECT and GRAMMATICAL ASPECT. One of the main claims pursued here is that such interactions are semantically motivated: it is the nominal argument linked to the Incremental Theme role that interacts with the aspectual semantics of verbal predicates and sentences, at least in the most typical cases. I will show how such interactions, which appear to be procedural and directional, can be described declaratively within a constraint-based (or unificationbased) framework. This area intersects with lexical semantics, morphology and it poses intriguing problems to the mapping between syntax and semantics. It also provides an excellent basis for cross-linguistic studies and for exploring how nouns and verbs relate to the ontology of individuals and eventualities. The data is mainly drawn from English and Slavic languages, which are compared to German and Finnish. 1

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: Current syntactic accounts of English resultatives are based on the assumption that result XPs are predicated of underlying direct objects. This assumption has helped to explain the presence of reexives with some intransitive verbs but not others and the apparent lack of result XPs predicated of subjects of transitive verbs. We critically review these accounts and present problems and counterexamples to some of their basic assumptions, thus undermining their explanatory power. We develop an alternative account that appeals to principles governing the well-formedness of event structure and the event structure-to-syntax mapping. This account covers the data concerning intransitive verbs and predicts the distribution of subject-predicated result XPs with transitive verbs. The English resultative construction has gured prominently in discussions of unaccusativity since it appears to provide strong evidence for the syntactic encoding of the dierence between unaccusative and unergative...

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this paper, we argue that the impact of traditionally recognized aspectual properties --- particularly the notions just cited --- on argument expression has been overestimated (see also Reinhart 2000). Notions such as telicity have been We thank audiences at the Round Table on the Syntax of Tense and Aspect for their questions and comments. This work was supported in part by US NSF Grant SBC-0096036 to Levin and by Israel Science Foundation Grant 832-00 to Rappaport Hovav

this paper we argue that these two sets of examples represent distinct phenomena and are derived in different ways. Our analysis provides a syntactic derivation for the examples in (1) and a lexical derivation involving the creation of a new lexical entry for those in (2). Thus, we will refer to the two types of examples, respectively, as syntacticallyderived and lexically-derived accomplishments. We show, furthermore, how, if the distinction we draw is correct, the phenomena under discussion argue against a pure syntactic encoding of event structure (Borer 1994, in press; Erteschik-Shir and Rapoport 1995; Ghomeshi and Massam 1995; Goldberg 1995; Hoekstra 1992; Ritter and Rosen to appear), since such an encoding cannot naturally capture the difference between the two types of accomplishments. In section 1 we set out the similarities between the examples in (1) and (2)---similarities that have been used to argue for a uniform account. Next, in section 2 we show that there are significant differences between the two that suggest a uniform account is untenable. After introducing our model of verb meaning in section 3, we present accounts of each set of examples as two distinct types of derived accomplishments in sections 4 and 5. Finally, in section 6 we discuss the implications of the two types of derived accomplishments for efforts to provide an entirely syntactic encoding of event structure. 1 The Uniform Approach