The macro-event property

Bohnemeyer, Jürgen; Enfield, N. J.; Essegbey, James; Kita, Sotaro

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511782039.003

Cited by 69 publications

(31 citation statements)

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“…In contrast, constructions that allow multiple temporal modifiers with independent scope are said to refer to different macro-events. This temporal-scope unit corresponds to the unit of the core in role-and-reference grammar (Bohnemeyer & Van Valin 2009). This criterion neatly captures the idea that single events should form a single coherent unit of space-time (e.g.…”

Section: Svcs and Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do serial verb constructions describe single events?: A study of co-speech gestures in Avatime

Defina¹

2016

Language

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Serial verb constructions have often been said to refer to single conceptual events. However, evidence to support this claim has been elusive. This article introduces co-speech gestures as a new way of investigating the relationship. The alignment patterns of gestures with serial verb constructions and other complex clauses were compared in Avatime (Ka-Togo, Kwa, Niger-Congo). Serial verb constructions tended to occur with single gestures overlapping the entire construction. In contrast, other complex clauses were more likely to be accompanied by distinct gestures overlapping individual verbs. This pattern of alignment suggests that serial verb constructions are in fact used to describe single events.*

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Section: Svcs and Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do serial verb constructions describe single events?: A study of co-speech gestures in Avatime

Defina¹

2016

Language

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“…Our observations about the distribution of meaning components across different parts of the clause and even across clauses are in line with Bohnemeyer et al (2007, p. 496) who state that "information about an event is usually not mapped onto a single lexical item, but is distributed across phrases, clauses, and larger chunks of discourse". More generally, the literature on event representation and the segmentation of causal chains reports language-specific differences in the detail in which sub-events are habitually expressed (e.g., Bohnemeyer et al, 2007Bohnemeyer et al, , 2011Bohnemeyer & Pederson, 2010;van Staden & Reesink, 2008). A tendency to distribute information is commonly reported for Papuan languages among others and has been extensively discussed in studies on verb serialization (e.g., De Vries, 2005;Heeschen, 1998;Pawley, 1987;Pawley & Lane, 1998).…”

Section: Patterns In the Conflation And Distribution Of Semantic Comp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing and taking

Hellwig

Margetts

Riesberg

et al. 2022

Typological Studies in Language

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This chapter proposes a typology of expressions of directed caused accompanied motion (directed CAM): it introduces and defines this semantic domain, presents the corpus-based methodology used by the authors of this volume, and gives an overview of the results. It shows that directed CAM expressions tend to be morphosyntactically complex and it identifies four distinct patterns based on the lexical core of the expression: first, with a directed CAM verb; second, with an intransitive motion verb; third, with a transitive verb of accompaniment or of caused (accompanied) motion; or fourth, with a combination of the second and the third options. The chapter discusses each pattern and addresses issues of universality and variability in the domain of directed CAM.

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“…This property is semantically the most important and it is also the most challenging to capture formally, since the notion of a 'single event' (or 'one integrated situation') is hard to define. There have been attempts to formalize this notion using the theoretical construct of a macro-event property (Talmy 2000, Bohnemeyer et al 2007, Bohnemeyer et al 2011, the central linguistic correlate of which is the impossibility for a temporal operator (time adverbial, temporal clause or tense) to modify only one of the composing sub-events to the exclusion of the other. Bohnemeyer et al (2011: 48) defines this notion as follows:…”

Section: One Single Eventmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building complex events

Prete

Todaro

2019

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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We examine the Doubly Inflected Construction of Sicilian (DIC;Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, 2003, Cruschina 2013, in which a motion verb V1 from a restricted set is followed by an event verb V2 and both verbs are inflected for the same person and tense features. The interpretation of DIC involves a complex event which behaves as a single, integrated event by linguistic tests. Based on data drawn from different sources, we argue that DIC is an asymmetrical serial verb construction (Aikhenvald 2006). We propose an analysis of DIC in which V1 and V2 enter the semantic composition as lexical verbs, with V1 contributing a motion event and projecting a theme and a goal argument which are identified, respectively, with an agent and a location argument projected by V2. A morphosyntactic mechanism of feature-spread requires that the person and tense features be realized both on V1 and on V2, while, semantically, these features are interpreted only once, in a position from which they take scope over the complex predicate resulting from the combination of V1 and V2. The semantic analysis is based on an operation of event concatenation, defined over spatio-temporally contiguous events which share specific participants, and is implemented in a neo-Davidsonian framework (Parsons 1990).

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The macro-event property

Cited by 69 publications

References 0 publications

Do serial verb constructions describe single events?: A study of co-speech gestures in Avatime

Do serial verb constructions describe single events?: A study of co-speech gestures in Avatime

Bringing and taking

Building complex events

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