ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3, we looked at entities and their typical encoding as nouns. In this chapter, we consider the basic counterpart of entities, events, along with their typical encoding as verbs. We proceed in a manner analogous to Chapter 3, first discussing the semantic motivation of verbs as events, and then surveying three proposals for verbal categoriality: a discourse approach and two conceptual approaches. Thereafter, we take inventory of the kinds of events available to language, limiting our discussion to four principal classes: acts, states, causes, and motion. We describe such things as the nature of states, the logic of causation, and the connection of motion to sources, goals, and trajectories; we also look at the ways different languages translate these notions into grammatical form, and, more generally, how we can use the results of this analysis on other event classes, like transfer and possession. To close the chapter, we consider various attempts to unify classes of events through typologies based on their meanings and their distribution over a time interval. We see how the treatment of events as temporally sensitive phenomena meshes nicely with their typing by interval and produces an explanation of events and their associated structural reflexes.
