Guest speaker: Bridget Copley (Centre national de la recherche scientifique/Université Paris 8) presenting joint work with Heidi Harley (University of Arizona): "What would it take to tame the verbal Hydra?"
Like the mythological Hydra, prominent theories of the syntax-semantics interface in the verb phrase boast multiple verbal heads, either in parallel (Folli and Harley 2005a, 2005b), or in series (Ramchand 2008). In either case, the need for syntactic heads to select appropriate lexical roots requires that a considerable amount of information is duplicated between the lexicon and the syntax. In this paper we hypothesize a single unified verbal head for dynamic predicates, with the aim of reducing the selection problem to ordinary type-driven semantic composition. To construct the denotation of the unified verbal head, we adopt two recent ontological innovations to the theory of event structure: the use of degree arguments to represent change (Hay et al. 1999, Kennedy and McNally 1999, Kennedy and Levin 2008, Kennedy 2012) and the use of force arguments to represent energy (Copley and Harley 2015). For the single-head analysis to work for major predicate classes and basic modifiers, we find that the tweaks to compositional theory that are needed are relatively minor, and raise interesting questions about the relationship between roots and structures.
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