Events: Modification, Aspect and Lexical Meaning Course Number: LSA.315

Course description This course sets out with an examination of the role of events in accounting for inferential properties of modification. It presents a model of the logic of modification following the neo-Davidsonian mode of composition but rework-ing the Davidsonian framework. The approach is shown to accord with more intuitively appealing notions of event individuation and to afford a uniform treatment of individual-denoting and quantificational arguments/modifiers, a standard semantics for negation, and a relatively straightforward account of stacked temporal modifiers. The exploration of the role of events in aspectual composition, in other types of telicity phenomena, and in lexical meaning mo-tivates a novel approach to telicity which correlates event structure with the grammar of measurement and scalar semantics. The focus will be on extending the empirical domain to data that have so far not been (easily) tractable within any single proposal, on cross-linguistic variation in the expression of telicity, and its relation to perfective and imperfective aspect