Assuming that events form a genuine ontological category, shall we say that a good inventory of the world ought to include “negative” events—failures, omissions, things that didn’t happen—along with positive ones? I argue that we shouldn’t. Talk of non-occurring events is like talk of non-existing objects and should not be taken at face value. We often speak as though there were such things, but deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to avoid serious (...) ontological commitment. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the semantics of copular be as displayed in its behaviour in be+AP configurations. I begin by arguing against the Partee/Dowty distinction between a semantically null be of predication and a thematically relevant agentive be, and I propose that there is one semantically relevant verb whose grammatical role is to turn an AP predicate into a verbal one. The denotation of be must thus be a function from denotations of Adjective Phrases to denotation of Verb (...) Phrases. I argue that these denotations are crucially different in kind: verbs (and thus VPs) denote eventualities, which are count entities and which are temporally locatable, while adjectives (and thus APs) denote mass entities, which are states and which are not temporally locatable. Be thus denotes a locating function which maps from the mass to the count domain, and is the analogue of the ‘packaging’ function in the nominal domain. After a comparison between the mass/count distinction in the verbal and nominal domains, I show how this theory accounts for properties of be in small clause and progressive constructions which have hitherto been explained by positing a so-called agentive be. (shrink)

Semitic templates systematically encode two dimensions of verb meaning: (a) agency, the thematic role of the verb’s external argument, and (b) voice. The assumption that this form-meaning correspondence is mediated by syntax allows the parallel compositional construction of the form and the meaning of a verb from the forms and the meanings of its root and template. The root and its arguments are optionally embedded under a light verb v which introduces the agent (Hale and Keyser 1993; Kratzer 1994). But (...) this is only the unmarked case, which, in Semitic, is encoded by the simple templates. Two dimensions of markedness are introduced by two additional types of syntactic heads: (a) agency heads, which modify agency and are morphologically realized as the intensive and causative templates, and (b) voice heads, which modify voice and are morphologically realized as the passive and middle templates. Causative and middle morphemes are thus accounted for within a unified system, which, first, explains their affinity in language in general (both are found crosslinguistically as markers of transitivity alternations), and which, moreover, sheds new light on problems in the interface of semantics and morphology. One problem is the impossibility, mostly ignored in linguistic theory, of deriving the semantics of middle verbs from that of the corresponding transitive verbs. The second is explaining the identity found crosslinguistically between middle and reflexive morphology. The third is determining the grammatical function of the causee in causative constructions. (shrink)

The dissertation is a contrastive analysis. It deals with the acquisition of English relative clause (RC) by German and Turkish students(in Germany and Turkey) learning English as a second and third language and attending the 11th grades of a German school. The main question of the study is to find out whether the acquisition of English RCs is more difficult for German or for Turkish learners. The other study is the corpus analysis of the English relative clauses. For this research (...) I have chosen various school books from the fields such as History, Chemistry and Literature. The target is to find out how often the English relative clauses are used. They are from the same school level (11th grade) where I have applied the tests. I wanted to know which difficulties exists for the students. Moreover the frequency of English relative clauses in the school books has been given. (shrink)