Aspectual composition and sentence interpretation : a formal approach
This thesis is principally concerned with aspectual composition. Although there have been some recent studies on this topic, none has succeeded in explaining all the different aspectual interactions existing between a verb and its arguments. This thesis explores the interpretation of sentences containing transitive or intransitive verbs and their arguments. It is found that sentence interpretation (in terms of distributive and collective readings) together with a speaker's linguistic knowledge of the world plays a decisive role in determining the aspectual interaction between a verb and its arguments. An important part in this thesis is the study of predicate properties. The parallelism between the domain of objects and that of events is stressed by defining a set of properties which may apply to predicates over both domains, namely quantisation and homogeneity. The analysis is formalised by means of lattices which represent our linguistic knowledge of the structure of the world. Objects and events are categorised by means of predicates, according to the standard (extensional) definition of a predicate in Predicate Logic. Quantisation and homogeneity are defined as properties of first-order predicates, allowing
MollaÌ-Aliod, Diego
Aspectual composition and sentence interpretation : a formal approach. This thesis is principally concerned with aspectual composition. Although there have been some recent studies on this topic, none has succeeded in explaining all the different aspectual interactions existing between a verb and its arguments. This thesis explores the interpretation of sentences containing transitive or intransitive verbs and their arguments. It is found that sentence interpretation (in terms of distributive and collective readings) together with a speaker's linguistic knowledge of the world plays a decisive role in determining the aspectual interaction between a verb and its arguments. An important part in this thesis is the study of predicate properties. The parallelism between the domain of objects and that of events is stressed by defining a set of properties which may apply to predicates over both domains, namely quantisation and homogeneity. The analysis is formalised by means of lattices which represent our linguistic knowledge of the structure of the world. Objects and events are categorised by means of predicates, according to the standard (extensional) definition of a predicate in Predicate Logic. Quantisation and homogeneity are defined as properties of first-order predicates, allowing
aspectual composition sentence interpretation formal approach principally concern aspectual composition although recent_study topic none succeed explain different aspectual interaction exist verb argument explores interpretation sentence_contain transitive intransitive verb argument find sentence interpretation term distributive collective reading together speaker_linguistic knowledge world play decisive role determine aspectual interaction verb argument important_part study predicate property parallelism domain object event stress define set property may apply predicate domain namely homogeneity analysis formalise mean represent linguistic_knowledge structure world objects event categorise mean predicate accord standard extensional definition predicate predicate logic homogeneity define property first order predicate allow