“Markus Egg”:http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~egg/ (2003): “Beginning novels and finishing hamburgers - remarks on the semantics of ‘to begin’”:http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~egg/Papiere/begin.sub.ps.gz. To appear in Journal of Semantics 20. An earlier version appeared in J. Dölling and T. Zybatow (eds): Ereignisstrukturen. Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 76, Universität Leipzig, 295-319.
bq. Abstract: Verbs like begin may take either a VP or an NP complement, but their meaning is pretty similar in both cases, e.g., for begin, the start of an eventuality is at stake. Pustejovsky’s approach captures this similarity in terms of an invariant meaning of the verb, which entails a process of reinterpretation for the transitive variant of the verb. I will show that while the intuitions of this proposal are on the right track, its actual implementation suffers from a number of shortcomings. I will offer an analysis that preserves Pustejovsky’s intuition but avoids these shortcomings. My analysis is based on an appropriate underspecification formalism.
Note: This paper comes in g-zipped postscript format. Unfortunately, it contains many bitmap fonts. Printing should be fine but to view the postscript file onscreen, I recommend using pkfix on it first, “as described previously”:http://fintel.mit.edu/geek/archives/000077.html.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Wednesday, March 5th, 2003, at 3:09 pm.
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