From real-world events to linguistic descriptions: Lessons from “variable behavior verbs”

How are events that occur in the real world represented in language? How do we go from the chaotic, disorderly, “kaleidoscopic flux of impressions” that we observe in the world to a discrete representation - a particular verb, along with its arguments, arranged in an orderly syntactic structure? In this talk, I consider as a case study the linguistic puzzle of “variable behavior verbs” - a set of intransitive verbs that can appear in sentences with distinct syntactic structures, whose alternation between those structures depends on the meaning of their arguments and on the context in which they are used. Focusing on linguistic descriptions of weather events in English, like “it is raining”, and of existential events in Russian, like the equivalent of “there is a book on the table”, I account for variable behavior verbs by presenting a model of the relationship among happenings in the real world, verb meaning, and syntactic representation.

Speaker: Bonnie Krejci, Stanford University

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