Event Encoding in a Crosslinguistic Perspective
Course 319
LSA Linguistic Institute
July 2015
University of Chicago
General Information:
- Instructor: Beth Levin
- Dates: Mondays and Thursdays, July 20-July 30, 2015
- Time: 10:30am-12:20pm
- Place: Social Sciences 302
Course Description:
Talmy's work on the lexicalization of motion events draws attention to
significant differences in the strategies languages use to describe such
events. This work shows that languages may differ in how they distribute
the semantic components of a motion event description across the
syntactic constituents of the clause. This course examines motion and
other event types which show multiple encodings within and across
languages. It investigates to what extent the attested encoding options
stem from the interaction of crosslinguistically applicable argument
realization principles with the varying lexical and morphosyntactic
resources available to individual languages and to what extent they
reflect alternate conceptualizations of certain event types. Examples
and case studies involve the event types described by a subset of change
of state verbs, ditransitive verbs, hitting verbs, motion verbs,
psych-verbs, and weather verbs. Concomitantly, the course considers
conceptual categories that find expression in languages, including
affectedness, external/internal causation, motion, and scalar change.
Prerequisites:
The course will be most profitable for those with
some familiarity with basic semantic and syntactic concepts.
Course Assignment:
(Pre-Phd) students taking this course for
credit or a letter grade must complete
the assignment by the end of
class Thursday, July 30, 2015.
Handouts from Lectures:
Return to Beth Levin's
home page.