WHAT THE STRUCTURE OF CRITERION PREDICATES TOLD ME

The notion of criteriality in predicate descriptions introduced in an article by Kearns in 2003 is taken up in a recent article by Sæbø and formalized to explain the semantic processing of English by-clauses. In the present paper I relate this notion to another notion of criteriality introduced in the linguistic literature a decade earlier, and apply the recent work to ing-participial adjuncts. 1 The background One central goal of my work in linguistics about a decade ago was to get closer to an understanding of the discourse relations that are inferred to hold between ING-participial adjuncts and their matrix clauses, and to be able to explicate the procedures by which the individual discourse relations obtain. In this work event structure proved invaluable. The long established Vendlerian event classifications were used (Vendler 1967), and the causative event complex as modelled in Higginbotham (1994) and Kamp and Roßdeutscher (1994) allowed sub-events in the semantic representation. A causative discourse relation was seen to emerge if the adjunct expressed a causative event whose properties were such that the Causing sub-event was relatively void of content. This causing sub-event referent would thus look for its content in the matrix predicate, and the causative relation between matrix and adjunct would result from the causative relation in the complex adjunct event. (1