Objecthood: An event structure perspective
Objecthood: An event structure perspective
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对象性：事件结构视角
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发表时间：
1999
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通讯作者：
B. Levin
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作者：
B. Levin
“对象”概念1在描述语言内部和跨语言的语法现象时被证明是有用的，因为它挑选出一组名词短语，其特征是Keenan（1976）所说的行为和编码属性的收敛。与此同时，这个概念甚至在某些语言表示方法（如关系语法、词法功能语法）中被视为基本概念，并在其他方法（如政府绑定框架）中被视为可配置定义。然而，“对象”这个概念仍然对语言学理论构成挑战。例如，在某种程度上，它是跨语言适用的，在不同语言之间，有相当多的变化，作为动词的NPs识别为对象的集合。此外，很难——有些人甚至可能说不可能——为语言内部或跨语言的所有对象提供统一的语义特征，即使人们一致认为原型对象是“病人”——有时被称为“受影响的”参数。这些问题反映了“对象”概念的语义基础，是本文的重点。由于及物动词必然有宾语，对及物性理论的一个挑战是如何处理刚刚提到的涉及到宾语的语义关联的问题。在本文中，我从一个新颖的角度重新审视了这些问题，表明在最近关于动词意义的结构和表征以及论证许可的工作背景下，可以卓有成效地探索及物动词的概念“对象”。最近的许多研究都集中在“事件”这一概念上，认为它是意义语言学表征中的一个重要组织概念，动词意义表征中与语法相关的成分现在通常被称为“事件结构”，因为它的形式是由动词的基本事件类型决定的。我认为有两种不同的事件结构可以产生对象：复杂的致因事件结构和简单的事件结构。我认为，这两个对象来源揭示了一些众所周知的与客体性的语义基础相关的挑战。我用英语的及物动词来说明这些观点，尽管我相信这项研究的结果将在很大程度上推广到各种语言（见第4节）。
The notion 'object' 1 has proved useful in the description of grammatical phenomena in and across languages as it picks out a set of noun phrases characterized by a convergence of what Keenan (1976) calls behavioral and coding properties. Concomitantly, this notion has even been taken as a primitive within certain approaches to linguistic representation (e.g. Relational Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar) and as amenable to a configurational definition in others (e.g. the Government-Binding framework). Nevertheless, the notion 'object' continues to pose a challenge for linguistic theory. For instance, to the extent that it is applicable crosslinguistically, there is a fair amount of variation across languages as to the set of verbs taking NPs identified as objects. Furthermore, it is difficult—and some might even say impossible—to provide a uniform semantic characterization of all objects within or across languages, even if there is agreement that the prototypi-cal objects are 'patients'—what are sometimes called 'affected' arguments. These problems, which reflect the semantic underpinnings of the notion 'object', are the focus of this paper. Since transitive verbs necessarily have objects, a challenge for theories of transitivity is how to deal with the just-mentioned problems involving the semantic correlates of objecthood. In this paper I revisit these issues from a novel perspective, showing that the notion 'object' of a transitive verb can be fruitfully explored in the context of recent work on the structure and representation of verb meaning and the licensing of arguments. Much recent research has converged on the notion 'event' as an important organizing notion in the linguistic representation of meaning, and the grammatically-relevant component of a representation of verb meaning is now often called an 'event structure' because its form is determined by the basic event type of the verb. I suggest that two distinct event structures can give rise to objects: a complex, causative event structure and a simple event structure. I argue that these two sources for objects shed light on some of the well-known challenges associated with the semantic underpinnings of objecthood. I use the transitive verbs of English to make these points, although I believe that the results of this research will largely generalize across languages (see section 4).