Ramchand- Aktionsart, L-Syntax and Selection

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Aktionsart, L-syntax and Selection

Gillian C. Ramchand

University of Oxford

1. The Lexical Determination of Aspect

Vendler’s 1967 article presenting the Aristotelian classification of event types and relating it to

classes of predicate in natural language is the source of much stimulating work on the aspectual

or event structure classification of verbs (Dowty 1979, Taylor 1977, Kenny 1963). While it is

now understood that the original division into states, activities, achievements and accomplish-

ments cannot correspond directly to what is specified in the lexicon, many theories attempt to

use lower level aspectual features that are derived from these larger natural classes. In partic-

ular, notions such as telicity / boundedness, dynamicity or durativity have played an important

role in subsequent theories of event structure decomposition and lexical classification. In gen-eral, many researchers have attempted to classify verbs by means of their inherent aspectual

properties (Grimshaw 1991 Hoekstra 1984 Tenny 1987 Levin and Rappaport 1995) as a way of

capturing important linguistic generalisations.

Any analysis of the lexical contribution to aspectual classification is complicated by the

well-known facts that the addition of PPs to a Verb Phrase can significantly modify the aspectual

character of that VP. Specifically, goal phrases create ‘accomplishments’ from ‘activities’ (in

the Vendler 1967 sense).

Perhaps even more difficult to deal with is the notorious fact that the nature of the object

(in terms of quantized-ness or some equivalent semantic notion) of a particular verb can have a

direct effect on the telicity of the result, as the standard tests show (Verkuyl 1972, Dowty 1979,Tenny 1987, Krifka 1989).

The question which naturally emerges from an appreciation of these semantic facts, is the

extent to which it is possible to preserve a lexical distinction among verb types while still

maintaining a compositional aspectual semantics within the VP. Clearly, the feature contributed

by the lexical verb simpliciter is of a slightly different order from the Vendlerian class labels or

even from the lower level notions of telicity and durativity.

The present paper continues the quest for a set of lexical determinants for aspectual com-

position. The theory of lexical features that I will present here is in many ways a grateful

exploitation of the work and insights that have come before. It owes a lot to, and has much in

common with that work. However, it also constitutes a very particular set of axiomatic assump-

tions and very particular kind of implementation of the way in which syntax and semantics are

thought to interact.

¡

I would like to thank David Adger, Miriam Butt, Raffaella Folli and Peter Svenonius for many comments and

discussions on the issues found in this paper.

1



1.1 Classifying Argument Roles

To deal with the problem of aspectual determination, linguists have attempted an explicit aspec-

tual classification of thematic roles and relations. Most notable in this class are the proposalsintroducing lower level features such as +ADD-TO, +SQA (Verkuyl 1989, Verkuyl 1993) or

QUA and Mapping-to-Objects (Krifka 1989) which can combine with the processual nature of

the lexical item to give telicity under certain conditions. The aspectual thematic role in this

sense is defined by the entailments about aspectual structure that it gives rise to (see also Ram-

chand 1993, Ramchand 1997). The argument structure of a predicate is one of the things that

linguists have felt the need to specify anyway in the lexicon to capture certain linguistic gen-

eralisations (Baker 1988, (Grimshaw 1991)).1 The intuition behind the ‘aspectual theta role’

theories is that the lexical determination of aspect follows directly from the lexically specified

(aspectual) argument structure of the predicate.

Of course, the flip side of the lexical specification problem is the fact that lexical predicatestypically demonstrate argument structure flexibility. In other words, a particular verb can appear

in one or two or more argument frames.

(1) (a) John broke the vase.

(b) The vase broke.

(2) (a) John walked.

(b) John walked Mary to the store.

We need to be able to classify the argument types specified by different lexical items while

still allowing them the flexibility we find. At the same time, this flexibility is not completely

general, otherwise the problem would be considerably simplified.

(3) (a) John arrived.

(b) *Bill arrived John.

1.2 Decomposing the Event

Another very common technique of verbal decomposition over the years is the one that started

with the generative semantics tradition (McCawley 1968) and was pursued in various formsover the years by linguists such as (Dowty 1979) and (Parsons 1990), and which finds its

echoes today in more minimalist frameworks (Hale and Keyser 1993). In this sort of frame-

work, the verbal meaning is composed of subevents which are independently conceptualised

using primitives such as CAUSE, DO and BECOME. At the same time, in the event semantics

tradition, complex events of the accomplishment kind are explicitly decomposed into subevents

with primitive modes of event composition available (Parsons 1990,Pustejovsky 1991)

The event analogue of the flexibility noted in the previous section is what one might call

template augmentation (Levin and Rappaport 1998) or event type-shifting (van Hout 2000,

2001). One example might be the adding of a causative subevent to an already possible event

structure (as in (4)), or the adding of a telos to a process verb (as in (5))2

(4) John jumped the horse over the fence.

1Assuming we are not embracing the constructional radicalism of Borer 1998.2Here I am assuming that a telos can be added by a PP, adjectival resultatives, and particles.



(5) John ate the porridge up.

Once again, these processes are not completely general since some verbs seem to resist

causativisation (6a), and others resist telic augmentation (6b)

(6) (a) *John slept the baby.

(b) *John watched Mary bored/to boredom.

Given the number of different ways of approaching the problem, some natural questions

arise.

I Which primitives are minimally necessary to express

(a) the semantic elements of aspectual composition?

(b) the lexical specificity of vocabulary items in semantic and syntactic environments?

(c) the featural elements responsible for driving the corresponding syntactic representa-tions?

II Are these three separate questions, or just one? In other words:

(a) Do we need both (lexical) argument role classifying primitives as well as (semantic)

event structure primitives or does one follow from the other?

(b) How is the primitive classification (in whatever terms) cashed out and implemented

within a syntactic derivation?

In this paper, I pursue the intuition that lexical, semantic and syntactic generalisations are

all driven by the same set of abstract primitives.

This paper is divided into two parts. First, I try to justify the minimal elements required byany theory, based on well known natural language patterns and previous work in the area. In the

subsequent sections, I offer an explicit proposal of lexical specification, where the same set of

‘features’ is the basis for both the semantic/event structure composition and for the construction

of syntactic representations.

2. The Relevance of Causation

Ever since the unaccusative hypothesis of Perlmutter 1978, the existence of an ‘external ar-

gument’ or ‘agent’ has been cited as criterial of a major division in (intransitive) verb types.

However, Rappaport-Hovav and Levin 2000 show convincingly that it is not agency per se that

determines class membership as either unaccusative or unergative. The following intransitives

cited by them pass the diagnostics for unergativity in Italian, Dutch and Basque even though

they are profoundly non-agentive.

(7) glow, stink, spew

Even in English, the fact that these verbs possess an external argument can be demonstrated

by their ability to take X’s way objects under certain circumstances (examples 8) and also show

an inability to causativise (examples 9)3.

(8) (a) He stank his smelly way home.

(b) The water spewed its way along the corridor.

(c) John ran his way into history.

3These examples are taken from Rappaport-Hovav and Levin 2000



They also show an inability to causativise.

(9) (a) *Michael glowed Karena’s face.

(b) *We spewed the water out of the sink.(c) *We stank the dog by throwing him in the cesspit.

(d) *John ran Mary by scaring her with a live mouse.

I accept the general intuition that there is an important primitive underlying the distinction

between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ arguments, but I will assume (with Rappaport-Hovav and

Levin 2000 and many others) that the relevant abstract category is that of ‘causer’ or ‘initiator’.

Among transitive verbs as well, external arguments can be volitional agents (10a, 10b),

instrumentals (10c), abstract causes/sources (10d 10e, 10f).

(10) (a) John broke the window.

(b) John built that house.(c) The hammer broke the window.

(d) The videotape from the secret camera demonstrated the truth of the matter.

(e) The storm broke the window.

(f) John’s money built that house.

I’m going to assume, therefore, that even though agency might be relevant for the felicity in

certain circumstances, it does not directly determine syntactically relevant class membership.

3. The Relevance of Telicity

There seems to be a fair amount of evidence which argues that certain argument positions are

more implicated in the construction of telic effects within VPs than others (classically, the ‘in-

ternal’ argument vs. the ‘external’ one). Here I will argue that there is definitely a relationship,

but that there is no straightforward one to one correspondence between ‘internal arguments’ and

the semantic feature [+telic], even when the internal argument in question is ‘quantized’ (in the

sense of Krifka 1989) or [+SQA] (in the sense of Verkuyl 1993). Specifically, I will argue that

there are two distinct kinds of aspectually sensitive internal arguments, and that ‘quantization’

is only relevant for a subtype of one of these.

The arguments for the lack of a simple relationship between the feature [+telic] and theinternal argument go in both directions. First of all, the existence of telicity does not actually

imply the existence of an internal argument.

(11) John stood up in a second.

Conversely, the existence of an internal argument does not imply telicity (not even when it

is quantized).

(12) John pushed the cart for hours.

Indeed, going back to diagnostics for unaccusativity, it seems that verbs which describe achange of state on the part of an argument do not necessarily entail the attainment of a final

state.

(13) widen, harden, descend, rise, fall



A gap can widen but is doesn’t necessarily become wide; a balloon can rise without ever

hitting the top of the sky.

(14) (a) The gap widened for three minutes (and then it began to close again).(b) The balloon rose for 3 minutes.

(c) The ball rolled for 30 seconds.

Moreover, these verbs display unaccusative behaviour in the languages where the diagnos-

tics are clear, indicating that they actually have internal arguments in the relevant sense. Cor-

respondingly in English, as Rappaport-Hovav and Levin 2000 note, these verbs do not occur in

the X’s way construction; and many of them do causativise.

It seems that what is crucial here is the notion of the argument undergoing some sort of

identifiable change/transition, whether it is with respect to its location (15), its state (16), or its

material extent (17).

(15) (a) The ball rolled down the hill.

(b) The mangoes ripened in the sun.

(c) The bucket filled with rain.

In the case of transitive verbs, we find direct objects that fulfil this condition of ‘undergoing

change’ as well: you can make a good ‘object’ if the change that of location (16), state (17) or

material extent (18) (see Ramchand 1997 and Hay, Kennedy, and Levin 1999).

(16) (a) John pushed the cart.

(b) Mary dried the cocoa beans.

(c) Michael gobbled the mangoes.

The broad notion of UNDERGOER (after Van Valin 1990) seems to be the one responsible

for class membership here, and includes objects of verbs of creation/consumption like eat , as

well as objects of verbs of translational motion like push and drive. In other words, the existence

of an UNDERGOER does not necessarily imply telicity, even when it is quantized (however we

choose to define that).

(17) (a) Michael gobbled the mango in an hour/for an hour.

(b) John pushed the cart for an hour.(c) Mary dried the cocoa beans in the sun for an hour.

These objects are merely undergoers of transitional states. If the transitions are related to

the object’s material extent, then quantizedness will produce a telic entailment as in (15). But

if the transitions are related to the object’s change of location, then only the specification of a

final location will create telicity (18).

(18) John pushed the cart to the end of the garden.

If the transitions are related to the object’s change of state, then only the specification of thefinal relevant state will create telicity (19) (see Hay, Kennedy, and Levin 1999 for a detailed

discussion of telicity effects with this type of verb.)

(19) Mary dried the cocoa beans bone dry in only 12 hours.



Thus, we really need to distinguish between UNDERGOER and the purely semantic notion

of telicity. None of these verbs is obligatorily telic; they can be interpreted as telic as a result

of entailments triggered by nature of the direct object or the existence of a final state achieved.

I take the telicity effects in this class of verbs to be purely semantic, and not encoded in thelexical determination of the verb or its syntactic reflexes.

However, there are certain verbs that are obligatorily telic. They systematically reject the

for an hour test, in contrast to the group of verbs above where it is always possible to get an

atelic reading.

(20) (a) John broke the stick in a second/*for seconds.

(b) Mary arrived in two minutes/*for two minutes.

(c) Michael gobbled the mangoes up in just 10 minutes/*for ten minutes.

Clearly, the telicity of this class of verbs needs to be represented differently from the telicity

that sometimes arises from the semantic combination of an UNDERGOER verb and a quantized

object. In other words, these verbs resist the atelicity test because their objects are already de-

fined as holders of a final state. They aren’t merely UNDERGOERS; I will call them RESULTEES.

I have stated the generalisations primarily over argument type, but also implied that they

corresponded to a generalisation about the relevant subevent. The question is whether these

generalisations are indeed actually equivalent, and whether we can get away with specifying

only one and not the other.

In earlier work, van Hout 1996 claimed that all that was necessary in the theory was a

statement of lexical event type. Argument structure could then be derived from this by system-

atic principles which allow the subevent to be ‘identified’ (cf. Grimshaw 1991, Grimshaw and

Vikner 1993). However, van Hout 2000 retreats from this position, showing that different verbs

with the same event type nevertheless can specify different numbers of arguments.

In the next section I will try to develop a proposal which goes back to the strong position

found in the earlier van Hout, but with a finer grained analysis of subevents.

4. An L-syntax Decomposition

The challenge now is to understand how the specification of lexical items is stated so as to

determine (but not overdetermine) the sorts of syntactic representations they are compatible

with. In addition, the lexical specification needs to provide the features that will be the input

to a compositional aspectual semantics in the determination of the meaning. The proposal I

will make here is that the lexical features allow the licensing of syntactic structure (seen as an

l-syntax in the sense of Hale and Keyser 1993) and that this l-syntax is then interpreted by a

strict event-compositional semantic component which feeds off the syntactic representation so

constructed. In this way, one set of features will be responsible both for the argument structure

syntax and the event structure interpretation.

According to the discussion in the previous section, I will assume that the lexical item cor-

responding to a dynamic verb needs to specify (i) the presence or absence of a cause subevent,and (ii) the presence of absence of a result subevent.4

4I am assuming here that there is a process portion that is the necessary component of any dynamic (i.e.

nonstative) verb. The other two components may or may not be present.



Thus, the full l-syntactic structure that could be expressed by a lexical dynamic verb is

shown below5.

vP¢¢

¢

¢

£

£

£

£

v ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ VP¢

¢

¢

¢

£

£

£

£

V © ¤ ¨ § § R P

R ¨ § ¦ XP

I claim that the different patterns of l-syntactic projection correspond intuitively to what

many linguists have tried to capture with the notion of ‘aktionsart’ category (as opposed to

sentential aspect).

For the semantic interpretation of this structure, I adopt a Post-Davidsonian6. semantics

which interprets the verbal heads of the l-syntax in a regular and systematic way.

There are two primitive modes of sub-event composition to create complex events :

Event Composition Rule I

e = e

e

: e consists of two subevents, e

, e

such that e

leads to or causes e

(see Hale and Keyser 1993)

Event Composition Rule II

e = e , e ! : e consists of two subevents, e , e such that e and e form an accomplishment

event structure where e

is the process portion and e

is a state interpreted as the result state of

the process. (see Parsons 1990, Higginbotham 1999, Pustejovsky 1991)

There are a number of general primitive predicates of events as follows:

State(e) : e is a state

Process(e): e is a process

Causing(e): e is a causing event

Further, the objects of particular event types are interpreted according to the primitive role

types defined below.

Object (x, e) and Causing(e) entails that x is the INITIATOR of e.

Object(x, e) and Process(e) entails that x is the UNDERGOER of the process.

Object(x, e) and State(e) entails that x is the HOLDER of the state.

The R head in the l-syntax is interpreted as building a state description that has particular

‘holder’ in its specifier position. Its semantic interpretation is given below:

(21) Rv = $ P $ x $ e [P(e) & State(e) & Object(x,e)]

The central verbal head, V, is interpreted as a process which has an UNDERGOER in its

specifier position. If it combines with a state description projection as its complement, that

state is interpreted uniformly as the result state emerging from the process. The interpretation

of such a head is given below in (22)

5See Borer 1998, Ritter and Rosen 1998 and Hale and Keyser 1993 for some recent proposalsfor event structure

decomposition within syntax.6I use the term ‘post-Davidsonian’ to describe the theoretical position whereby verbs do not have events in their

‘argument structures’, but where events and subevents corresponding to the interpretation verbal heads are utilised

in the expression of compositional semantic meaning.



(22) V ='

R'

x'

e(

e)

, e0

[R(e0

) & V1

(e)

) & Process(e)

) & e =2

e)

, e0 3

& Object(x, e)

)]

Any argument which is the holder of the result state is now the RESULTEE in my terms.

Finally, the highest verbal head v, is interpreted as an initiating event which leads to the

(possibly complex) event constructed by the lower structure that it combines with. The specifier

position of this projection is interpreted as the ‘causer’ or INITIATOR of the subevent. The

interpretation of v is given in (23).

(23) v = ' R ' x ' e ( e 4 , e 5 [R(e5 ) & v1

(e 4 ) & Causing(e 4 ) & e = e 4 6 e5 & Object(x, e 4 ) ]

Given the semantics of these various heads, if the heads are not built up in the correct order,

the derivation will at best converge as gibberish. Even within this broad constraint, it is clear

that there are a number of different l-syntaxes that can be built using this basic inventory of

functional heads.Thus, the next step involves implementing a traditional notion of selection. Over the past

forty years, linguists have used the notion of ‘selection’ (c-selection or s-selection) to describe

a wide variety of different data and phenomena across languages. Within the newest syntac-

tic frameworks, the question of how to implement those generalisations naturally arises. In a

system like the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, Chomsky 1999, Chomsky 1998), where

syntactic structures are built up by Merge and Move derivationally, subject only to principles

of full interpretation at the interfaces, all selection needs to be implemented in terms of fea-

ture checking. Further constraints are put on the process if we assume together with Pesetsky

and Torrego 2000 that features come only in interpretable/uninterpretable pairs, and that an in-

terpretable feature on a ‘probe’ checks and values an uninterpretable feature on a ‘goal’ in itsdomain within the phase (as in Chomsky 1998).

Implementing selection in this kind of system crucially depends on the types of features

available in syntactic computations. It would be nice if c-selection could reduce to the checking

of the categorial features of heads (as in Svenonius 1994), with no subclass of ‘selectional’

features involved.7

I will make the assumption that the only features that are allowed are ones that are inter-

pretable somewhere. The features we minimally need for the l-syntax proposed above are the

category features of the three eventive functional heads. I will further assume that they are in-

terpretable and that they are the features that trigger the semantics of event composition. Since

we minimally need [+v, +V and +Rv] to get the semantics of the event composition to come out

right, we should assume that this is all we need.

First of all, the l-syntax built according to the template above, can be freely built up by

Merge but not all three heads will always be licensed. I implement this by making a distinction

between the merging of purely syntactic elements bearing formal features vs. the substitution of

lexical items into those syntactic nodes of the structure. To make selection work in these terms,

purely syntactic nodes must bear only uninterpretable category features; while only actual lexi-

cal items have interpretable category features (recall that an unchecked uninterpretable feature

at the end of a phase causes the derivation to crash (Chomsky 1999, Chomsky 1998)).

7As briefly mentioned before, there are two sides to the selectional problems in this domain: on the one hand

verbs in many languages seem to exhibit event structure flexibility and argument structure changing in a generaland systematic way (a fact emphasised by Borer 1998); on the other hand, verbs rarely, if ever, show the complete

flexibility one would expect if roots carried no syntactic or selectional features (facts emphasised by the lexicalists,

eg. Levin and Rappaport 1998). The system I will propose involves a constrained departure from recent hypotheses

of Marantz 1997 and Borer 1998 concerning the impoverished nature of roots/vocabulary items in relation to their

syntactic environment.



A. Licensing and Identifying Event Structure (cf. van Hout 2000)

(i) Syntactic Licensing: Build syntactic structure freely with no lexical terminals. The heads

of such structure contain only uninterpretable category features. Structure cannot be licensedunless there is an interpretable category feature in the same phase (on the lexical item) which

will check it via AGREE.

(ii) Semantic Licensing/Identification: The eventive content of each head needs to be semanti-

cally identified. This can be done via overt lexical content in the head, or by being in a chain

with something with overt lexical content.

Thus, if a lexical item is specified as having the interpretable category feature the structure

will be licensed, and not otherwise.

In addition to the building of l-syntactic structure, we also need to have some principles

which regulate the appearance and interpretation of nominal arguments. I will make the as-sumption that all the heads in the l-syntax require a filled specifier (i.e. they all have an [+EPP]

feature). As we have seen, these specifier positions are interpreted systematically by the general

semantic component as: INITIATOR, UNDERGOER and RESULTEE respectively. There are thus

no thematic roles, only three universal semantic rules triggered by syntactic structure.

One major departure I make from other systems is that I propose that these specifier posi-

tions are not mutually exclusive. In other words, it is possible for a single argument to be in

more than one of these positions simultaneously (or have them linked together in an A-chain).

This means that I am assuming that there is no 7 -Criterion, and that the semantic interpreta-

tion of the positions so linked get unified. In principle, there is no incompatibility between

the semantics of INITIATOR, UNDERGOER, RESULTEE and so no violations will occur purelybecause of unification.

To capture the facts about argument structure which underlie much of the work on lexical

semantics, we need to state a relationship between the filling of the specifier positions of an

l-syntactic position and the verb’s feature specification. In short, one further condition lexical

items appear to impose on their syntactic representation is whether the specifier positions of the

l-syntactic projections they license are filled by separate nominals or by the same nominal. I

implement this with the feature [+Move]. Assuming that a specifier position is filled by means

of MERGE in the default case, if the specifier is filled by raising an already present argument

from below, then it needs to explicitly require MOVE8. (See McCloskey 2000 for an identical

feature.)

B. The Lexical Items

The lexical items in this system come specified only with the following:

(i).A number of interpretable category features

(ii) Information on whether/if any of the category features are [+Move].

C. Basic Principles of Argument Realisation

(i) Each head in the l-syntax requires a filled specifier position (i.e. comes with an [+EPP] fea-

ture).

(ii) A single argument can be in more than one Spec position.

In this system, no specific rules of augmentation will be required. Structure building will be

8If MOVE actually turns out to be conceptually more natural than MERGE, we could implement the intuition

by specifying the heads that require MERGE specifically instead.



free, modulo syntactic and semantic wellformedness.9

5. Deriving Verb Classes

To give some concrete examples, if a lexical verb is specified as [+V, +Rv], it can license a

Process-Result structure. The verb would Merge and project as Rv, and then the V remaining V

feature would check the higher uninterpretable head, presumably also triggering head to head

movement in that case to identify the relevant subeventive structure.

(24) Process-Result: x broke

VP8

8

8

8

8

9

9

9

9

9

UNDERGOER

y

V@

A

A

A

A

B

B

B

B

V RvPA

A

A

A

B

B

B

B

RESULTEE

y

Rv@

C

C

D

D

Rv

break

XP

If the lexical verb is specified as [+v, +V, +Rv], then it can license a full Cause-Process-

Result structure, with the verb Merging as little Rv, and then raising to check and identify the

features on the V and v heads.

(25) Cause-Process-Result: x broke y

vP88

8

8

8

9

9

9

9

9

INITIATOR

x

v@8

8

8

8

8

9

9

9

9

9

v VP8

8

8

8

8

9

9

9

9

9

UNDERGOER

y

V@

A

A

A

A

B

B

B

B

V RvPA

A

A

A

B

B

B

B

RESULTEE

y

Rv@

C

C

D

D

Rv

break

XP

Thus, the verb break comes with a full complement of category features, but with the v

feature optional. Moreover, the RESULTEE and UNDERGOER are always identified with this

verb, indicating that the V feature must be specified as [+Move]10

.9As we will see in the next section, some flexibility in a verb’s lexical entry can also be introduced by the

optionality of some of the category features in its specification.10Interestingly, there seems to be an empirical generalisation here that in English the RESULTEE and the UN-

DERGOER are always identified with each other when they both exist. Identification of the adjacent Specifier



(26) Lexical entry for break : (v), VE F G H I P Q

, Rv

Unergative motion verbs are distinguished in this system because they effect a different kind

of identity— that between the INITIATOR and the UNDERGOER.

(27) Cause-Process: x walk

vPRR

R

R

R

S

S

S

S

S

INITIATOR

x

vT

R

R

R

R R

S

S

S

SS

v VPR

R

R

R

S

S

S

S

UNDERGOER

x

VT

U

U

V

V

V

walk

XP

(28) Lexical entry for walk : v E F G H I P Q , V

This identity is not logically necessary of course, since both arguments can be separately

represented in other dynamic non-R verbs such as push and eat .

(29) Cause-Process: x pushed/ate y

vPWW

W

W

W

X

X

X

X

X

INITIATOR

x

vT

W

W

W

W

W

X

X

X

X

X

v VPW

W

W

W

W

X

X

X

X

X

UNDERGOER

y

VT

Y

YY

`

`̀

V

push/ate

XP

(30) Lexical entry for push: v, V

(31) Lexical entry for eat : v, V

Recall that the verb eat is a directed change verb in this system, not a result verb. Since it is

a creation/consumption verb, if the object is quantized, it will give rise to a telic interpretation

of the VP (32a). This is different from being a Result verb which is telic regardless of the natureof the object (32c)11

positions may be a prerequisite for ‘accomplishment’ formation in the interpretation of the l-syntax. I leave further

generalisations of this type to further research.11This reading forces a specific indefinite reading of apples in (32c).)



(32) (a) John ate the apple in an hour.

(b) John ate apples *in an hour.

(c) John ate apples up in an hour.

Pure process verbs are also possible in this system (unaccusatives which express a directed

change, with no necessary final end state). In the case of the verb roll below, it is also possible

to find this verb in a transitive version (although this is not found for all pure process verbs in

general).

(33) Process: x rolled

VPa

a

a

a

b

b

b

b

UNDERGOER

x

Vc

d

d

e

e

V

rolled

f g

(34) Lexical entry for roll: (v), V

There also seem to be systematic ways of of building RvPs within the l-syntax of English

to augment process verbs. Recall that structure can be built freely, but that if there is no lexical

item to check the structure it will not converge. Under this system, PPs, particles and adjectival

resultatives are lexical items which allow the identification and licensing of a result state inEnglish and can therefore be freely added to any process verb, and will be felicitous provided

the state so identified is compatible with the conceptual structure of the verb.

(35) John ate the apples up.

(36) John wiped the table clean.

(37) Cause-Process-Result: x wipe y clean

vPhh

h

h

h

i

i

i

i

i

INITIATOR

x

v ch

h

h

h

h

i

i

i

i

i

v VPh

h

h

h

h

i

i

i

i

i

UNDERGOER

y

Vca

a

a

aa

b

b

b

bb

V

wipe

RvPp

p

p

p

q

q

q

q

RESULTEE

y

Rvc

r

r

s

s

Rv XP

clean

(38) Lexical entry for wipe: v, V .



6. Conclusion

In this paper I have argued for a particular set of features which constitute the lexical determi-

nants, or lexical inputs, to an aspectual calculus. I have argued that we can get away with justspecifying which of the features v, V and Rv are present in interpretable form on the lexical

item, plus information on whether the obligatory specifiers are filled by Merge or Move. This

system is thus an l-syntax version of the intuition in van Hout 1996 that the lexical item de-

termines event structure directly and only indirectly the argument structure. I also argued that

a constructional view of the l-syntax and its universal semantics allows for argument structure

flexibility within the limits of the verb’s lexical specification.

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