ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a cognitive linguistic approach to the grammar of event structure in English aspectual constructions and grammatical relations. The emphasis is how the event structure underlying verb meanings interacts with the conceptualization of events provided by the semantics of grammatical constructions. The chapter provides some remarks on the relationship of this approach to traditional issues in grammatical analysis. The central starting point for the analysis of grammatical structure in linguistics is what is called distributional analysis: the distribution of words across grammatical constructions. By examining the meanings of verbs in constructions, we can establish semantic classes of events and conceptual meanings of constructions. The flexibility of grammar is limited to some extent by the expectations of what the world is like and how different types of events can be plausibly construed. It is also limited by conventionalized construals of events that have historically become fixed in languages and that also tend to vary across languages.
