Abstract
As the counterpart to kinds of entities or objects [5], event kinds are used to account for a variety of linguistic facts in the event domain. The modification of event kinds is usually considered to be restricted, and temporal modifiers are claimed to be hardly acceptable [18]. In this paper I focus on verbal gerunds in English, which have been analyzed as event kind descriptions [15], and demonstrate that they accept temporal modification but remain kind-referring. I extend the analysis of frequency adjectives [13] to interpret both temporal and frequency modifiers in verbal gerunds, showing that the modification of event kinds is less restricted than commonly assumed.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Borik & Espinal [4], the generic reading of expressions like the lion is a direct combination of the definite article with a property of kinds. It does not have a Number projection, and is therefore numberless. I refer to such expressions as definite singular solely because of their surface non-plural form.
- 2.
The definite singular is commonly used to encode genericity, but it is not analyzed as a kind-denoting expression in all the accounts. For example, Chierchia [7] analyzes the lion as a group-denoting expression that comprises both singular and plural denotations of the noun lion.
- 3.
In the literature on nominal kinds, there are at least two different views: one is based on the instances of a kind, such as the view of kinds as individual concepts corresponding to functions from worlds to the sum of all the instances of the named kind in each world [7], and the other sees kinds as an intergral sortal concept [4, 21]. In this paper I am not committed to a specific view of event kinds other than that they are intensional objects.
- 4.
My data were collected from a copy of BNC previously parsed with part-of-speech tags and dependency relations using MALTParser (http://www.maltparser.org/).
- 5.
An anonymous reviewer pointed out that in the case of both verbal gerunds being acceptable with temporal modifiers, almost all the participants should have chosen “both are possible”. I believe that the current results are due to a general preference towards ACC-ing. In a different pilot experiment, I observed that participants assigned high scores to ACC-ing preceded by as a result of and because of, which are both predicted and attested in the corpus to take both verbal gerunds, while assigning low scores to the POSS-ing counterpart in the same sentence. The explanation for this preference will be left for future research.
- 6.
The material and the original data of this experiment can be found at https://osf.io/pbhyt/.
- 7.
Most of the test items in this experiment have a matrix predicate that accepts human subjects: take (time), begin/finish at (time), be fast/slow/sloppy/meticulous, go fast/slowly. Two test items use take place (at a location), which is incompatible with human subjects, but the scores for these two items in ACC-ing conditions are not lower than POSS-ing conditions.
- 8.
This does not mean that there is no difference between POSS-ing and ACC-ing. For example, Portner [24] proposes that POSS-ing is definite and ACC-ing indefinite, making them different from a discourse pragmatic aspect. Grimm & McNally [15] argue that POSS-ing is a possessive structure, and that therefore it tends to imply the existence of an event token, but note that POSS-ing can be selected by predicates like prevent, which denies the existence of any event tokens: George prevented Clay’s winning the game.
- 9.
With the limited amount of corpus data, one could pursue an alternative hypothesis that avoids the problem of event kind modification: that temporal modifiers occur with verbal gerunds only because the corresponding nominal gerund is not available. Many cases in the BNC, like (23) and (24), cannot be expressed with -ingof: *my wanting of the window open. It is possible that the attested cases are a measure of last resort, and when an -ingof form is available, like in (25) and other test items in my experiment, the verbal gerund would be blocked resulting in low acceptability. More data and experiments will be needed to support this hypothesis.
- 10.
An anonymous reviewer pointed out that frequency adverbs are acceptable in German adjectival passives if they target the consequent state instead of the underlying event kind: Das Fenster ist oft geöffnet. ‘The window is often open(ed).’ See [10] for a discussion about two types of modifiers in adjectival passives.
- 11.
An account of gerunds based on propositions still has an advantage in this regard, because this distinction is as simple as deciding whether the original proposition is an episodic or a generic one.
- 12.
Grimm & McNally [15] treat them as VP.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers. This study is supported by an FI-AGAUR grant (2019FI-B00397), the grant FFI2016-76045-P (AEI/FEDER, EU) and an ICREA Academia award to Louise McNally.
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Huang, Z. (2024). Temporal Modification of Event Kinds. In: Pavlova, A., Pedersen, M.Y., Bernardi, R. (eds) Selected Reflections in Language, Logic, and Information. ESSLLI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14354. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50628-4_8
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