![The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 13
2. Background assumptions
Linguistic expressions relate a Phonetic Form PF to the representation of its meaning, the
linguistic aspect of which is called Logical Form or Semantic Form SF.1
Hence a linguistic
expression is a pair <PF, SF>, where PF determines its pronunciation and SF its conceptual
interpretation. Each expression is furthermore categorized by syntactic and morphological
features Cat, classifying e.g. dreams as alternatively verb, present, and third person singu-
lar, or as noun and plural. Finally, a linguistic expression is characterized by its Argument
Structure AS, which consists of a hierarchically structured sequence of argument positions
or theta roles, determining the properties of constituents the expression may or must com-
bine with. In particular, the theta roles in AS impose conditions called s-selection and c-
selection, determining the semantic and morpho-syntactic properties of expressions saturat-
ing the theta role in question.2
Thus the theta role to be saturated by the subject of the Verb
dreams requires semantically a human (or personal) entity and syntactically a nominative
singular DP. These two types of constraints are naturally determined by the semantic aspect
of the argument position and by morpho-syntactic features associated with it. More techni-
cally, a theta role Θ, is a pair < λχ,, F,>, where λχ, abstracts over a variable in SF, and F, is
a (possibly empty) set of features to be matched by the features in Cat of a constituent satu-
rating 0j. The s-selection of 0j can now be understood as an effect of the predicates apply-
ing to Xj in SF, while the c-selection is due to features that follow from grammatical rules or
principles, or are specified by lexical idiosyncrasy. A preliminary illustration of the as-
sumptions sketched so far is given in (2), the lexical entry for the German temporal preposi-
tion nach (after), which differs grammatically from the directional preposition nach (to-
wards) by the categorization [ - Directional] :
[ Τ y > Τ χ ]
SF
As indicated in (2), Cat and AS constitute jointly what one might call the Grammatical
Form GF of a linguistic expression, because Cat and AS together determine essentially its
grammatically controlled combinatorial potential. On the other hand, AS and SF together
1
I need not go here into details related to the terminological decision. While LF, as used in Chom-
sky (1981) and subsequent work, is primarily concerned with syntactically determined aspects of
meaning, SF is concerned also with the (grammatically relevant) internal structure of lexical items
determining their contribution to the meaning (or conceptual interpretation) of linguistic expres-
sions. For some discussion of these matters and the overlap in orientation between LF and SF see
Bierwisch (1997). As I am concerned here with issues that clearly relate to word-internal condi-
tions of semantic representation, I will take SF to provide the relevant representational format.
2
The terminology - semantic or s-selection and categorial or c-selection - is due to Chomsky
(1986), where selectional restrictions were not formally associated with theta roles, however.
(2) / nach / [-V,-N,-Dir] λχ λy
[+Obl]
PF Cat AS
GF](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-24-320.jpg)
![14 Manfred Bierwisch
can be considered as the Extended Semantic Form ESF, according to which e.g. a preposi-
tion like nach is a two-place relation.3
This will turn out to be crucial for the semantic
combinations an expression may enter into.
Within the SF of (2), Τ is a functor that assigns a time interval to its argument, and the
two place predicate > represents an ordering-relation over the set of time intervals. Hence χ
and y are variables over individuals susceptible to ordering in time. Hence the s-selection
associated with both argument positions of nach requires entities to which a time interval
can be assigned. The c-selection determined by the Object Position is expressed by the
feature [+Oblique] requiring a Dative-DP.4
The other argument of nach - and of preposi-
tions in general -, sometimes called the external or designated argument, does not specify
features of c-selection, a point to which we will return. The conditions of s- and c-selection
just mentioned must be met e.g. by the object of nach in a phrase like nach der Wahl (after
the election). Suppose for the sake of illustration that something like (3) abbreviates the
representation of the object-DP in question, where [DEF e [ ELECTION e ] ] identifies a defi-
nite individual:5
(3) /der Wahl/ [+N,-V,+Obl ] [ DEFe[ELECTIONe] ]
Merging (2) and (3) yields a PP with the representation indicated in (4), where the SF of (3)
replaces the variable χ in (2) as an effect of lambda-conversion, triggered by the combina-
tion of (2) and (3) through functional application:
(4) / nach der Wahl / [-V,-Ν,-Dir] λγ[ Τ y > Τ [ DEF e [ ELECTION e ]] ]
(4) illustrates in a rather simplified form the result of combining a head with its comple-
ment. In addition to this type of combination called complementation, we need an account
of the operation that merges a head with an adjunct, as e.g. in Besuch nach der Wahl (visit
after the election), where nach der Wahl is a modifier, not a complement of the head Be-
such. Abbreviating the representation of Besuch by (5), we get something like (6) as the
result of merging a head with an adjunct:
(5) /Besuch/ [+N,-V,...] λζ [VISITζ]
3
Technically, ESF is an expression in a so-called lambda-categorial language. Assuming that for
principled reasons the SF of major syntactic constituents is to be construed as an expression of
type t, i.e. as a proposition, ESF becomes an η-place predicate with AS defining its arity, i.e. the
number and type of its arguments. See Bierwisch (1997, 2003) for further discussion.
4
The feature [+Obl] is in fact predictable, being the default case for objects of prepositions in Ger-
man. Hence it would not have to be specified in the entry (2). The principles and conditions con-
trolling such regularities will largely be ignored in the present context, except where event posi-
tions are involved.
5
This is, of course, an oversimplification in various respects. First, e must be construed as referring
to a definite eventuality of the sort discussed in Bach (1986), a point to which we will return. Sec-
ond, the definiteness operator DEF is actually a short-hand for a number of assumptions that cannot
be discussed here. It must, however, provide a referential binding for the argument position of the
Noun Wahl, turning it into a definite description, as will be discussed shortly.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-25-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 15
(6) / Besuch nach der Wahl / [ +N, - V,... ]
λ ζ [ [ VISIT Ζ ] & [ Τ Ζ > Τ [ DEF e [ ELECTION e ] ] ] ]
What (6) is supposed to account for is the observation that head and modifier are semanti-
cally combined by logical conjunction, and more specifically that the condition abbreviated
by VISIT specifies an event that is additionally subject to the temporal location expressed by
nach der Wahl. To this effect, the argument position λy of the adjunct (4) is absorbed by (or
unified with) the argument position λζ of the head (5). As both operators abstract over the
same sort of variables, the absorbing theta role does not violate the s-selection of the ab-
sorbed Role, which furthermore does not impose c-selectional constraints that could be
violated. Absorption of a theta role must furthermore be assumed to have two conse-
quences: First, the SF of the adjunct is added to that of the head by logical conjunction &.6
Second, the variable bound by the absorbed operator is substituted by the variable of the
absorbing operator. In the present case, λy is absorbed by λζ and y is substituted by z.
This account of (extensional) modification follows essentially the proposal made in
Higginbotham (1985). It must be generalized in non-trivial ways if e.g. intensional modifi-
cation as in der angebliche Besuch (the alleged visit) is to be included, since an alleged visit
is not something that is a visit and an alleged event. In Bierwisch (2003), I have argued that
in head-adjunct-combinations the head characteristically absorbs a theta role, as opposed to
head-complement-combinations, where the head discharges a theta role. We will return to
these matters below.
To sum up the framework sketched so far, we have lexical entries as sketched in (2), the
argument structure of which specifies their s- and c-selectional properties as illustrated
above. On the basis of these entries, syntactically complex expressions are created by the
operation Merge as illustrated in (4) and (6) for complementation and adjunction, respec-
tively. Merge combines two (basic or complex) expressions X and Y into a complex ex-
pression Z. One ofZ's constituents is its head, determining its categorization. A provisional
formulation of the properties of Merge is given in (7), presupposing that complex expres-
sions have the same basic organization as lexical items.
(7) Merge (X, Y) ==> Z, where
a. PF of Ζ is the linear combination of PF of X and Y,7
b. Cat of Ζ is projected from Cat of X iff X is the head of Z, and either
c. X discharges the lowest (i.e. next available) position of its AS to Y by
functional application with subsequent lambda-conversion within SF, or
d. Y discharges the lowest position in its AS to X by lambda-absorption, followed
by logical conjunction of the SF of X and Y.
6
For principled reasons, discussed e.g. in Wunderlich (2000) and Bierwisch (2002), the conjunction
& is asymmetrical, at least in the sense that one conjunct is closer to the functor than the other.
Whether and which semantic consequences are connected to this asymmetry need not concern us
at the moment.
7
Two qualifications are to be made at this point. First, I will ignore here morphological processes
with non-linear aspects of combination. Second, the linear ordering of head and complement or ad-
junct is subject to complex conditions of various sorts that must be left aside here.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-26-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 17
(9) a. Der Fahrplan ändert sich.
The schedule changes.
b. Der Fahrplan ändert sich häufig/oft.
The schedule changes often/frequently.
c. Der Fahrplan ändert sich am Montag.
On Monday, the schedule changes.
(10) a. Die Änderung des Fahrplans
The change of the schedule
b. Die häufige/*oft Änderung des Fahrplans
The frequent change of the schedule
c. Die Änderung des Fahrplans am Montag
The change of the schedule on Monday
Besides the specification of reference by means of tense and complementizer or determiner,
the event-reference is parallel for the causative verb, the inchoative verb, and the noun, both
in German ändern, sich ändern, and Änderung and in English verb and noun change. Also,
frequency and temporal modifiers apply to verbal and nominal heads in the same way. The
fact that oft and often are restricted to verbal heads, while häufig can modify verbs as well
as nouns, is due to c-selection by the adjunct, with oft imposing something like [ +V ]."
Furthermore, the event reference of verbs can enter standard anaphoric relations and may
be picked up by appropriate pronouns, as shown by the italicized elements in (11):
(11) a. Sie ändern häufig den Fahrplan. Das macht viel Ärger.
b. Sie ändern häufig den Fahrplan, was viel Ärger macht.
c. They change the schedule frequently, that/which is very irritating.
Again, this is essentially parallel to the referential character of nouns, with the anaphoric
relations based on their referential argument, as shown in (12):
(12) a. Er kritisiert die häufige Änderung des Fahrplans. Sie macht viel Ärger.
b. Er kritisiert die häufige Änderung des Fahrplans, die viel Ärger macht.
c. He criticizes the frequent change of the schedule, which/it is disappointing.
As already noted, c-selection imposed by morpho-syntactic features of adjuncts can restrict
them to verbal heads - as in oft (often), heute (today),jetzt (now) - or to nominal heads - as
in häufig (frequently), heutig (today's), or jetzig (present). The familiar semantic restric-
tions, on the other hand, based on s-selection and depending on the content of SF, carry
over from verbs to nouns, preventing (proper) events from durational modifiers like for
'1
A different, but comparable condition on c-selection restricts heute (today), gestern (yesterday),
damals (then), bald (soon) and others to verbal heads, as opposed to heutig, gestrig, damalig,
baldig modifying nominal heads. A closely related distinction is realized more systematically (but
not without exceptions) by the English suffix -ly . For further discussion of this point see Bier-
wisch (2003).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-28-320.jpg)
![18 Manfred Bierwisch
hours, and states from delimitations like quickly, or within a few minutes, as indicated in
(13) and (14).12
(13) a. Das Haus wurde {wiederholt/*stundenlang/ziemlich rasch} zerstört.
The house was {repeatedly/*for hours/rather quickly} destroyed,
b. Die {wiederholte/*stundenlange/ziemlich rasche} Zerstörung des Hauses.
The {repeated/rather quick} destruction of the house {*for hours}.
(14) a. Das Haus wurde {gestern/stundenlang/*ziemlich rasch} beobachtet.
The house was observed {yesterday/for hours/*rather quickly}.
b. Die {gestrige/stundenlange/*ziemlich rasche} Beobachtung des Hauses.
The {*rather quick} observation of the house {yesterday/for hours}.
Event variables cannot only enter anaphoric relations, they are also subject to quantifica-
tion, with frequency adverbials like always, often, occasionally, seldom, etc. acting as quan-
tifiers over eventualities. Thus the Logical or Semantic Form of (15a) should be something
like (15b), or slightly more formally (15c):
(15) a. The schedule changes frequently.
b. There are many e such that e is a change of schedule.
c. For many e [ the schedule changes (e) ]
Quantification applies not only to events but just as well to states, if instances are separable,
as in (16), where states are individuated by relevant occasions:
(16) a. Die Leitung ist immer besetzt.
The line is always busy,
b. Peter wiegt selten zu viel.
Peter seldom weighs too much.
Participating in quantification, event variables can furthermore be involved in scope rela-
tions. Thus the preferred reading of (17) assures that mail delivery occurrs regularly on
Monday, not on other days. In other words, on Monday qualifies the regular delivery, i.e. it
has scope over regularly. The preferred reading of (18), on the other hand, claims that on
Monday the delivery of mail is regular, i.e. regular qualifies the delivery on Monday, and
has, in this sense, scope over on Monday.
(17) Die Post wird regelmäßig am Montag zugestellt.
Mail is delivered regularly on Monday.
12
It should be noted that acceptability judgements can be obscured by a coerced, event-like interpre-
tation of observe, such that e.g. they will observe the house in three hours is construed as they will
start the observation of the house in three hours. But coercion of this sort confirms, rather than
spoils the tenet that s-selection is based on semantic conditions. I will return to these matters in de-
tail in section 7 and 8.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-29-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 19
(18) Die Post wird am Montag regelmäßig zugestellt.
On Monday, mail is delivered regularly.
Whether and under which conditions the preferred interpretation can be replaced by other
options need not concern us here. In part it is a matter of stress and focus-assignment,
which must be left aside. The point to be made is merely that event variables cannot only be
quantified - as in (15) and (16) -, but participate in standard relations of regular variables.13
4. Implementing event reference
As already noted, event reference has been introduced into standard semantic (or logical)
representations in different ways. The most direct proposal is due to Davidson (1967), who
suggested that the main predicate of an action sentence is to be extended by an additional
argument, which refers to the event characterized by the sentence in question. More techni-
cally, a proposition of the general form (19) should in fact be analyzed as (20), where P' is
an n+1 place predicate that relates Ρ and its arguments to the event e.
(19) P(x,,...,xn )
(20) 3 e [ P ' ( e , x , , . . . , x n ) ]
This proposal is illustrated in (21b), where the transitive verb butter of (21a) is analyzed as
a three-place relation between e and the arguments of the verb. Past tense, provisionally
indicated by T(e) < T(u), ordering e temporally before the utterance time T(u), and adver-
bials like in the kitchen are now treated as predications of e, conjoined to the main proposi-
lion.14
(21) a. Fred buttered the toast in the kitchen
b. 3e [ buttering (e, Fred, the toast) & T(e) < T(u) & in the kitchen (e) ]
Twenty years earlier, Reichenbach (1947) had already proposed a more general way to
introduce event variables. Instead of adding an argument to the major predicate, Reichen-
bach defined an event function [ ρ ]* which turns a proposition ρ into a property of events.
Substituting in this function the proposition (19) for p, one gets (22), which corresponds to
(19) very much like Davidson's (20) corresponds to the initial (19).
13
Scope variation of the sort illustrated in (17) and (18) does not carry over to nominalization, as
shown by (i) as opposed to (ii). This is due to conditions of DP-syntax that are not to be pursued
here.
(i) the regular delivery of mail on Monday
(ii) * the delivery of mail on Monday regular(ly)
14
The treatment of tense as a conjunct on a par with adjuncts must be modified for reasons to which
we return. For the time being it simply indicates the specification imposed on e.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-30-320.jpg)
![20 Manfred Bierwisch
(22) 3 e [ P ( x l s . . . , x n ) ] * ( e )
In these terms, the analysis of (21a) comes out as (23), with tense and adverbial modifica-
tion represented again by conjoined propositions:
(23) 3e [ [ buttering (Fred, the toast) ]*(e) & T(e) < T(u) & in the kitchen (e) ]
Reichenbach's proposal is more general than Davidson's, as it introduces an event variable
by a general event function15
, rather than by extending the arity of particular (classes of)
predicates.16
It could thus apply to any proposition, including those specifying e.g. locative
or temporal properties. This requires an empirically restricted occurrence of the event-
function, ultimately converging with the specification needed for event arguments of the
Davidsonian style. With this proviso, and ignoring certain consequences of the different
theoretical contexts of the two proposals, Davidson's and Reichenbach's event variables are
intended to account for roughly the same range of phenomena.17
In particular, both Rei-
chenbach and Davidson represent adverbial modification by conjoined predications of the
event argument, such that e.g. Fred buttered the toast follows from (21a) by the rules of
standard logic.
A rather different way to treat the event variable has been proposed a. o. by Parsons
(1990). This so-called neo-Davidsonian theory replaces (19) by (24), turning Ρ into a one-
place predicate P" of events to which the arguments of Ρ are then related by thematic rela-
tions Rj!,
(24) 3e [ P"(e) & R,(e, x,) & ... & Rn(e, xn) ]
Thematic relations are taken from the usual set of theta roles like agent, theme, source,
goal, etc. Under this proposal, the analysis of (21a) would come out as something like (25):
(25) 3e [ buttering (e) & Agent(e, Fred) & Patient (e, the toast) & T(e) < T(u) &
Location (e, the kitchen) ]
The move from (19) to (24) is - in spite of the deceptive terminology - a radical defection
from Davidson's original intention. Separating the core predicate from its original argu-
ments has far-reaching and fatal consequences. I will briefly sketch three of them.
15
Reichenbach explicitly uses fact function and event function synonymously. The distinction be-
tween facts on the one hand and events and states on the other made in Vendler (1967) and subse-
quent discussions corresponds more (but not exactly) to the distinction Reichenbach makes be-
tween objective or situational fact functions and propositional fact functions.
16
Davidson originally assumed event arguments for verbs of change and action. Later on, various
extensions have been discussed by various authors, including e-arguments not only for state verbs
but also for certain types of adjectives and heads of locative PPs. I will return to this matter below.
17
A hint to different notational variants appearing in the literature might be useful. In essentially the
sense of Reichenbach's event function, Kamp & Reyle (1993) use the colon to associate a proposi-
tion ρ with an event e, Wunderlich (2000) uses curly brackets, and Bierwisch (1988) an operator
inst. Thus [p]*(e), e:p, {p}e, and e iNSTp all specify an event e instantiating a proposition p.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-31-320.jpg)
![22 Manfred Bierwisch
(27) a. He doesn't sell it.
b. - 3 e [ sell (e) & Agent (e, he) & Theme (e, it) ]
c. Ve [ -i sell (e) ν -, Agent (e, he) ν -, Theme (e, it)]
According to normal understanding, (27a) is true if and only if there is no instance of his
selling it, whatever he and it are apt to refer to. The three options by which (27a) could be
falsified according to (27b) or (27c) are simply besides the point: There is no way to under-
stand what it would mean that someone referred to by he is not the agent of the selling
event e or something referred to by it is not the theme of that event, even if one ignores
problems related to quantification over events.20
Notice that this is different for something
like he doesn Ί sell it today, where the negation - in line with the original Davidsonian
approach - can appropriately apply to the event of his selling it and to the temporal location
of that event.
These and a number of further points concerning the controversial nature of separated
thematic roles strongly argue against the neo-Davidsonian approach. This leaves us with
two possibilities to incorporate event reference into the notational system sketched in sec-
tion 2. (28a) illustrates the Reichenbach-version of the verb sleep (using Kamp's ":" rather
than Reichenbach's "[ ]*"), while (28b) follows Davidson's proposal, extending the prop-
erty SLEEP into a relation between an individual and an event:
(28) a. / sleep / [ +V, -Ν ] λχ λε [ e : [ SLEEP Χ ] ]
b. / sleep / [ +V, -Ν ] λχ λε [ [ SLEEP' χ ] e ]
Assuming that eventualities like individuals are elements of type e, the one-place predicate
SLEEP in (28a) is of type (e, t), taking χ to build up a proposition of type t, and the colon : is
formally an operator of type (t,{e, t)), turning a proposition into a predicate of events. The
two-place predicate SLEEP' in (28b), on the other hand, is of type (e,(e, t)), turning two indi-
viduals into a proposition. In both versions, both variables are bound by argument posi-
tions, providing the subject position and the event reference, respectively. The difference
between (28a) and (28b) is in one respect more than merely a notational variant, however.
As the domain of eventualities includes events, processes, and states, the variable e is sub-
ject to a sortal choice, depending in one way or the other on the predicate that takes e as its
argument. In (28b) this choice is directly determined by the predicate SLEEP', while in (28a),
it must somehow be proliferated from the property SLEEP to the argument of the event op-
erator ":". I will return to this issue below.
It is worth noting that corresponding to the verb sleep, we have the entry (29) for the
event noun sleep, which differs merely by its categorization:
(29) / sleep / [ -V, +N ] λχ λβ [ e : [ SLEEP χ ] ]
20
It must be emphasized that what is at issue are the propositions that he and it are agent and theme
of e, not the identity of the individuals referred to. The identity of the individuals could be focused
and negated, as in HE doesn't sell it (but his BROTHER). - This is barely possible for the object
NP in (27), however, for independent reasons, preventing contrastive stress on it.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-33-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 23
This difference has important consequences beyond the categorization as such, because
argument positions differ systematically for nouns and verbs with respect to their syntactic
properties. Thus, argument positions of nouns are generally optional, except for the referen-
tial role, which happens to be the event position in (29). Hence λχ must be saturated by the
subject in (28), but can be left unspecified in (29), as in the sleep last night, etc.
In (29), as in lexical entries in general, the c-selectional properties associated with the
argument positions (such as case requirements) are largely predictable by the categoriza-
tion. Thus λχ requires nominative for the verb in (28), but (possessive) genitive for the
noun in (29). See e.g. Bierwisch (1997) and Wunderlich (2000) for further discussion.
Given the assumptions about SF sketched in section 2, the entry (28a) would now sup-
port representations like (30b) and (31b), again with obvious simplifications in various
respects:
(30) a. Fred slept in the kitchen
b . 3 e [ [ T e < T u ] [ e : [ SLEEP FRED ] & [ e IN [ DEF y [ KITCHEN y ] ] ] ] ]
(31) a. Fred slept for an hour in the kitchen
b . 3 e [ [ T e < T u ] [ e : [ SLEEP FRED ] & [ EXTENT e • 1 HOUR ] &
[ LOC e IN [ DEF y [ KITCHEN y ] ] ] ] ]
It must be added that (31b) is at best a first approximation, as it does not account for the
relative scope of temporal and locative adverbials in relation to their syntactic position.
5. The event structure of inchoativity and causativity
The verb sleep refers to a particular sort of state. The same type of state provides the source
of the change referred to by the verb awake (and wake up) and also the target state of the
inverse change referred to by fall asleep. The transitive variant of wake up furthermore
exemplifies the possibility to add an agent identifying the source of the change denoted by
the intransitive verb, a pattern characteristic for so-called ergative verbs like break, close,
change, etc. Following familiar assumptions, deriving from McCawley (1973), Dowty
(1979) and related work, grammatically relevant semantic relations within and between
causative and inchoative verbs based on the state characterized by SLEEP can be represented
as follows, with [ ACT y ] specifying the event which brings about the relevant change of
state:21
21
Actually, the proposition [ ACT y ] used here and in the sequel is a shorthand in various respects.
First, ACT must be construed as a predicate subsuming all sorts of appropriate activities by which
the effect in question can be brought about. Thus ACT comes close to a variable ranging over activ-
ity predicates. For a more detailed discussion of cause, effect, and causation see section 7 below.
Second, ACT is treated as a predicate applying to an individual that provides the argument position
of the agent, as exemplified in (i):](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-34-320.jpg)
![24 Manfred Bierwisch
(32) a. / sleep / [ +V ] λχ λε [ e : [ SLEEP χ ] ]
b. / awake / [ +V ] λχ λβ [ e : [ BECOME -, [ SLEEP χ ] ] ]
c. / awake / [ +V ] λχ λγ λε [ e : [ [ A C T y] [ C A U S E [ B E C O M E [ S L E E P χ ] ] ] ] ]
The transitive verb awake and its intransitive variant should, of course, be based on
(roughly) the same lexical item. (32a) and (32b) can in fact be collapsed into one entry as
shown in (33), where heavy parentheses include optional parts, the subscripts indicating
that they must simultaneously be present or absent:
(33) / awake / [ +V ] λχ (α λγ) λε [ e : ( Α [ [ A C T y ] [ C A U S E ) [ B E C O M E - . [ S L E E P χ ] ] ] ] ]
Thus, according to (33), if an agent is present, it is realized as the grammatical subject,
otherwise the argument of SLEEP becomes the subject. In German, the items integrated in
(33) require separate entries shown in (34c) and (34d), which cannot be collapsed, even
though they are etymologically related. German furthermore provides a lexical entry denot-
ing the inverse event of (33), as shown in (34b).22
(34) a. / schlaf- / [ +V ] λχ λε [ε: [ S L E E P Χ ] ]
b. / ein + schlaf- / [ +V ] λχ λε [ε: [ BECOME [ SLEEP χ ]]]
c. / auf + wach- / [ +V ] λχ λε [e: [ B E C O M E - , [ S L E E P χ ] ] ]
d. / (auf+) weck- / [ +V ] λχ Xy λβ [e: [ [ ACT y] [ CAUSE [ BECOME -, [ SLEEP x]]]]]
It might be added, that 8rgative verbs like (33) are represented in German by cases like
brechen(break), heilen(hea), schmelzen(melt) and others. However, the dominating pattern
relating inchoative and causativc constructions of the same verb in German is reflexiviza-
tion of the type (sich) öffnen (open), (sich) drehen (turn), (sich) biegen (bend), (sich)
ändern (change) etc. (Cf. sie ändern den Fahrplan vs. der Fahrplan ändert sich in (8) and
(9) above). A lexical entry of ändern (change) that would account for this aspect is
sketched in (35), where heavy parentheses again indicate optionality:23
(i) Paul woke me up
(ii) A sudden noise woke me up
As shown by (ii), however, the subject position of a causative verb can also be assigned to an
expression referring to an event rather than the relevant actor. Now, mutual substitution of actor
and event is a rather general phenomenon. It therefore needs a systematic account, which cannot
be pursued here any further.
22
The differences between (33) and (34) are in fact typical phenomena of lexicalization, exploiting
general principles of lexical representation in idiosyncratic ways. This includes the incidental
"overload" by the almost synonymous entries awake and wake up. A similar overload appears in
German with aufwachen and erwachen being largely synonymous. It is worth noting on this back-
ground that the lack of a straight causative counterpart for einschlafen (fall asleep) is not a mere
idiosyncrasy: the verb einschläfern (lull asleep), which would fill this position morphologically,
has the highly specialized interpretation of narcotize, obviously due to the fact that falling asleep is
internally triggered and cannot directly be caused by an external agent.
23
As a side-remark it might be mentioned that the predicate DIFFERENT is an abbreviation, to be
defined provisionally as follows, where { ρ } indicates that ρ is presupposed, as discussed below:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-35-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 25
(35) / änder- / [ +V ] λχ λγ λε [ e : [ ([ ACT y] [ CAUSE )[ BECOME [ DIFFERENT χ ] ] ] ] ]
In contrast to ergative verbs like (33), de-causativization is simpler in (35): No position
from the argument structure is deleted, optionality applies only to the causative component
in SF, leaving a spurious position Xy, as a consequence of which the object position is real-
ized by a reflexive pronoun.24
Thus although the reflexive construction looks superficially
more complex than the un-ergative use of a causative verb, the lexical information it re-
quires is surprisingly simple.
Turning now to the event structure based on lexical items with the internal make up il-
lustrated in (32) - (35), we notice first that inchoative verbs referring to an event e, involve
at least three eventualities: a source state Sj and a target state sk, such that the event e, is to
be defined as the transition from Sj to sk. Thus for einschlafen, Sj and sk are the states of
being awake and being asleep, respectively. Generally, the properties of the source state are
defined by those of the target state simply by negation. Hence if c, is just the transition from
Sj to sk, the information needed for the SF of an inchoative verb is only the specification of
BECOME and the proposition ρ specifying the target state.25
Second, causative verbs referring to an eventuality en involve at least a cause em and an
effect ei, such that en consists in the causation of ei by em. The effect ei might be a process,
as in the truck moved the trailer steadily, or a state as in the squad kept the rope straight,
but in the majority of cases it is an event, as in Max opened the bottle, Eve woke the kids up,
Macy's changed the schedule, etc. In case of an event causation, the event's source and
target state are to be distinguished. Hence causation of an event involves (at least) five
eventualities:
(36) a. the causing event em
b. the effect ei, identified as the change e,
c. the causation en of ei by the cause em
d. the source state Sj of e;
e. the target state sk of e;
(i) [DIFFERENTX] =def 5 (P, s) [ { SI [ P x ] } -, [ Ρ X ] ]
In other words, for something to be different with respect to some property P, a state meeting this
condition is presupposed. It is only this presupposed condition with respect to which a difference
can be identified in the first place.
24
This analysis implies (i) specific assumptions about improper positions in AS, i.e. operators that
do not bind a variable in SF, and (ii) a natural, but non-trivial assumption about reflexive anaphors,
according to which the antecedent of a reflexive pronoun provides the value for its argument posi-
tion. See Bierwisch (1997) for some discussion of both assumptions.
25
For inchoatives like close, open, wake up, redden, etc. this fact manifests itself even in their mor-
phological make-up. But also inchoatives like come and receive, where the target state is not
marked morphologically, derive the initial from the final state by negation. There are, however, at
least two types of lexical amendments that can be added to this basic pattern. First, for very few
cases the source state may impose additional conditions. A case in point is melt, which requires its
theme to start out as solid, rather than merely not liquid. Second, in cases like ersticken (choke),
ertrinken (drown), erfrieren (freeze to death), all with the target state not alive, the transition is to
be qualified by the mode of dying. Again the morphological make-up is relevant in many cases, an
issue that must be left aside here.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-36-320.jpg)
![26 Manfred Bierwisch
Corresponding to the target state, by which inchoatives are determined, the effect of the
causation tends to be characteristic for causatives. This is in fact the essence of the pattern
illustrated in (33), which captures the crucial property of so-called ergative verbs. It fur-
thermore turns in many cases the resulting state into the defining condition of the causation
as a whole. Obvious examples are the causative variants of open, close, wake up, dry, clean
or German schwärzen (blacken), kühlen (cool), töten (kill) etc.26
Differing from the source
state of inchoatives, the cause of causatives can be and often is lexically specified: erschla-
gen (slay) erstechen (stab (to death)), erschießen (shoot), erdolchen (stab (with a dagger))
differ from töten (kill) by specifying the action, left open in kill. As already mentioned, ACT
in (33) is a kind of dummy, in causatives like stab, shoot, or hang it is replaced by a lexical
specification of the pertinent action.27
Besides these differences in lexical specification, the eventualities listed in (36) differ
with respect to their temporal structure, their logical status, and their referential accessibil-
ity, as shown in sections 6 and 7.
6. The eventualities involved in BECOME
Taking BECOME as the core component of inchoatives, I will characterize its basic temporal
structure by means of conditions proposed e.g. in Dowty (1979), taking BECOME as an op-
erator of type (t, t) with the properties indicated in (37), where ρ specifies the target-state,
and I, J, Κ are time intervals as schematized in (38):
(37) [ BECOME ρ ] is true at I if and only if
(i) there is an interval J containing the initial bound of I such that —.p is true at J, and
(ii) there is an interval Κ containing the final bound of I such that ρ is true at K.
(38) J Κ
1 [' 1 " :
>
I
Two problems must be clarified here. First, as it stands, the interval I can extend over arbi-
trary parts of the source as well as the target state, such that Fred woke up would hold for a
situation that includes arbitrary parts of Fred's sleep and of his being awake. Second, if one
relies on strictly two-valued logic, no interval I' between J and Κ is possible, as at any time
26
Again, the defining target state may, but need not be morphologically realized. Thus while German
töten is related to tot (dead), the resulting state has no overt reflex in kill. Similarly give, show, or
convince are characterized by the resulting state, viz. have, see, and believe, respectively, without
morphological relationship.
27
The basic causative pattern can be enriched by further conditions, as in assassinate, murder, do-
nate, etc. Amendments of this sort don't change the event reference and can thus be ignored here.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-37-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 27
either ρ or —.p must hold, with no transition. Hence any change would have to be strictly
momentary. Dowty suggests to avoid these problems first by means of some sort of Gricean
maxim, which picks out the shortest non-empty interval appropriate under conditions of
encyclopedic or common sense knowledge, and second by acknowledging intervening
time-intervals with undecided (or not two-valued) truth conditions. This ambivalent time
structure of the event ej, which overlaps with both Sj and sk, is reflected by the fact that
normally ej is not available for durational adverbials, as shown in (39a), but might still be
qualified for extension in time in (39b):
(39) a. * The cat died for three hours,
b. The cat died very slowly.
The next point to be noted is the different status to be assigned to the event, its initial and
its final state. According to standard criteria, they instantiate what is usually called asser-
tion, presupposition and implication, respectively. Consider (40) for illustration:
(40) a. The cat died.
b. The cat didn't die.
c. Did the cat die?
d. Didn't the cat die?
Asserting and denying the cat's dying equally requires the initial state of the event, viz. the
cat's being alive, to hold before. It must also hold for both types of question (40c) and (40d)
to be appropriate. The negation of the initial state, i.e. the cat's being dead before the event,
is compatible with the negation (40b) only as a correction of the presupposition. The target
state on the other hand, viz. the cat being dead afterwards, follows from the truth of the
assertion (40a), while its negation, that the cat is still alive, follows from the denial (40b).
These observations are expressed more formally in (41) for the target state and in (42) for
the source state, where t o t ' represents (temporal) overlap of t and t', and { φ } ψ indicates
that φ is presupposed by ψ :28
(41) Ve [ 5s' [ e: [ BECOME ρ ] implies s': [ ρ ] ] ]
where Τ e = t, Τ s' = t', t' ο t , t' ο t", t < t" .
(42) Ve [ 3s [ e : [ BECOME [ ρ ] ] ] => [ { s: ρ ] } [ e : [ BECOME [ ρ ] ] ] ] ]
where Τ s z>c Τ e (i.e. s precedes e immediately)
(41) requires the target state s' to share its time in part with e and in part with the subse-
quent interval t". Because of (41), the source state s can overlap only with the initial part of
the event e. One might construe (42) as an operation that expands the expression to the left
of the arrow into that to the right of it, supplying automatically the presupposed source state
28
This notation is adopted from Kamp (2001), where properties of presuppositions are explored
more generally.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-38-320.jpg)
![28 Manfred Bierwisch
of an inchoative event. In any case, (41) and (42) spell out the properties of BECOME and the
predictable aspects of inchoatives based on it.
I will now turn to the intriguing question to what extent the eventualities involved in a
change of state are accessible for reference and modification. The analysis proposed for
wake up, einschlafen, or aufwachen (in (32b) and (34)) suggests that it is just the main
event, which the referential position Xc makes available to this effect. This seems to be born
out by cases like (43), where apparently tense, temporal and modal adverbials all apply to
the main event:
(43) Dann schlief sie innerhalb von drei Minuten ganz sanft ein.
Then she fell asleep very softly within three minutes
Similarly, adverbial quantification by frequently, usually, mostly, occasionally etc. as in
(44a) must rely on the same variable, given that adverbial quantifiers range over events, as
proposed e.g. by von Fintel (1994). Simplifying with respect to irrelevant details, (44a) is
thus to be analyzed as (44b), where [ MOST e ] must be construed as a quantifier with the
restrictor given by the SF of Eva schläft ein and the nucleus in zehn Minuten·.
(44) a. Eva schläft meistens in zehn Minuten ein.
Eva usually falls asleep within ten minutes
b . MOST e [ e : [ BECOME [ SLEEP EVA ] ] ] [ Τ e c 1 0 MINUTES ] ]
As noted right in the beginning, this is not the whole story, though. A crucial problem,
already illustrated in (1) above, is shown by the minimal pair in (45):
(45) a. Er ist in kurzer Zeit eingeschlafen.
(He fell asleep within a moment)
b. Er ist für kurze Zeit eingeschlafen.
(He fell asleep for a moment)
The temporal delimitation within a moment in (45a) characterizes the change, while the
durational adverbial for a moment in (45b) can only concern its resulting state. In other
words, different aspects of the complex eventuality must be available for modification.
One way to account for this observation has been proposed by McCawley (1973) within
the framework of Generative Semantics. According to this proposal, the system of pre-
lexical syntax provides two syntactic positions for an adverbial in cases like (45): within a
moment commands [ BECOME [ SLEEP χ ] ], whilefor a moment commands just the predica-
tion [ SLEEP χ ].29
The pros and cons of pre-lexical syntax need not be repeated here, as the
observation illustrated by (1) and (45) has various ramifications not naturally accounted for
on the basis of pre-lexical syntax. Notice first, that the alternative interpretation illustrated
in (45) carries over to adnominal modification, as shown by the parallel properties of the
(a)- and (b)-cases in (46) and (47):
29
This approach has been pursued in a number of ways, especially with respect to elements like
almost and again e.g. in von Stechow (1996). Alternative accounts of these facts, which do not
rely on pre-lexical syntax, are discussed e.g. in Kamp & Roßdeutscher (1994).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-39-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CA USE and BECOME 29
(46) a. Er kehrte nach kurzer Zeit/für kurze Zeit heim.
He returned home after/for a short time
b. Seine Heimkehr nach so kurzer Zeit/für so kurze Zeit
His return home after/for such a short time
(47) a. Das Wetter änderte sich plötzlich/dauerhaft.
The weather changed suddenly/permanently
b. Die plötzliche/dauerhafte Änderung des Wetters
The sudden/permanent change of the weather
The alternative furthermore persists under adverbial quantification as illustrated in (44).
Thus, a generic sentence like (48a) clearly requires quantification and modification to apply
to the event as a whole, while in (48b) only the temporally restricted sleeping period is
quantified over:
(48) a. Ein normaler Patient schläft meistens in ungefähr einer Stunde ein.
An average patient usually falls asleep within roughly one hour
b. Ein normaler Patient schläft meistens fur ungefähr eine Stunde ein.
An average patient usually falls asleep for roughly one hour
In principle, this type of interpretation again carries over from adverbial cases like (49) to
the adnominal modification in (50), which might be considered as clumsy, but neither as
ungrammatical nor unclear in interpretation:
(49) a. Gelegentlich ändert sich das Wetter in wenigen Minuten.
Occasionally the weather changes within a few minutes
b. Gelegentlich ändert sich das Wetter fur mehrere Wochen.
Occasionally the weather changes for several weeks
(50) a. Gelegentliche Änderungen des Wetters in wenigen Minuten waren absehbar
Occasional changes of the weather for within a few minutes were to be expected
b. Gelegentliche Änderungen des Wetters für mehrere Wochen waren absehbar
Occasional changes of the weather for several weeks were to be expected
With respect to the background assumptions sketched in section 2, the question arises
whether and how the state s', instantiating according to (41) the result of the change, should
be available for reference and modification in the same way as the event e. Formally, two
options can be adumbrated, if we assume that both the event e and its target state s' are
actually available in SF for abstraction by argument positions, an assumption that requires
the SF of an inchoative verb like einschlafen as illustrated in (34b) to be modified as shown
in (51), with the obvious modification in (41) and (42). The two options to be considered
can then be illustrated by (52).
(51) [ e :[ BECOME [s': [SLEEP χ ] ] ] ]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-40-320.jpg)
![30 Manfred Bierwisch
(52) a. / ein + schlaf- / [ +V ] λχ Xs' Xe [ e : [ BECOME [ s': [ SLEEP χ ] ] ] ]
b. / ein + schlaf- / [ +V ] λχ X(e,s') [ e : [ BECOME [ s': [ SLEEP χ ] ] ] ]
Both of these possibilities raise non-trivial problems. In (52a) an additional, presumably
optional, in any case rather specific position would have to be introduced into AS requiring
various conditions determining its properties and behavior. Even if s-selection would guar-
antee that only an appropriate adverbial can get its argument position absorbed by either Xs'
or Xe, there are still a fair number of unsolved problems raised by the additional, improper
referential position. These problems would not arise in (52b), where no additional position
is introduced, but merely λε, the regular event reference, is replaced by the position
supporting the complex variable (e,s') instead of the original e. This would require, how-
ever, an intricate and completely ad hoc regime of lambda abstraction, dealing with com-
plex variables and their effects. Hence instead of exploring artificial ways to adapt one of
the solutions hinted at in (52), it seems reasonable to stick to already available means as far
as possible, getting along without an additional eventuality-variable squeezed into AS.
Two observations seem to be relevant in this respect. First, adverbials that are neutral
with respect to event or state apply by default to the overall event. Thus even though the
time, the companionship, and the localization of Peter's change of place could just as well
characterize the target state, it is interpreted as a specification of the event:
(53) a. Peter kam gestern abend.
Peter came last night
b. Peter kam unerwartet nach Hause.
Peter came home unexpectedly
Even though (53a) would be compatible with the truth of Peter was here last night, it
clearly does not semantically represent that proposition. Corresponding comments apply to
(53b). Second, tense and time adverbials seem to be forced to apply to the same eventuality.
Thus, the durational modification in (54a) concerns the target state, which the past tense
locates before the utterance time, while the manner adverbial in (54b) modifies the change,
which the present tense locates (preferably) at utterance time.
(54) a. Das Tor öffnete sich fur fünf Minuten.
The door opened for five minutes
b. Das Tor öffnet sich langsam.
The door opened slowly
These observations suggest that there is only one event reference available, which must
support both the change or - under appropriate conditions - its result. This would be the
natural effect if inchoative verbs with the operator BECOME have the representation illus-
trated in (55) for sich öffnen (intransitive open):
(55) / öffn- / [ +V, -N ] XxXyXe [ e : [ BECOME [ OPEN χ ] ] ]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-41-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 31
The crucial point here is the status of BECOME marked by italicization.30
What this is in-
tended to indicate is a special type of optionality, in the sense that it can be ignored for
conceptual and truth-conditional interpretation, such that (54a) would have more or less the
interpretation of (56a) with the SF as indicated in (56b):
(56) a. Das Tor war fur fünf Minuten offen.
The door was open for five minutes
b . 3 e [ T e < T u [ e : [ O P E N [ D E F χ [ D O O R Χ ] ] ] & [ T e D 5 M I N U T E S ] ] ]
There is, however, a crucial difference in interpretation between (54a) and (56a): While
(54a) explicitly claims the resulting state to be the effect of a change, (56b) simply states a
past situation.31
This difference would be an automatic effect of the condition (42), if we
assume that the presupposed source state is introduced also if the "shadowy" operator does
not participate in further interpretation, in other words, if (55) is expanded into (57) in any
case,32
while (42) would of course not apply in (56):
(57) / öffn- / [ +V, -Ν ] λχ λy λε [{ s z>c e & s: -.[ OPEN χ ] } [e: [ BECOME [ OPEN χ ]]]]
Notice that the presupposed state s immediately precedes e, whether e instantiates an event
or a state. This fairly restricted stipulation associated with the status of BECOME yields ex-
actly the two options for reference to eventualities illustrated before. It furthermore carries
over to nouns as exemplified in (50). Thus Änderung (change) would have an entry like
(58), which refers either to the change or its result, triggering again by means of (42) the
presupposed source state:33
( 5 8 ) / änder-ung / [ +N ] (λχ) λβ [ e : [ BECOME [ D I F F E R E N T χ ] ] ]
On this background, it is interesting to note that reference and modification may oscillate
between the event (as a whole) and its target state, but not between the event and its pre-
supposed source state. Even adverbials that would conceptually fit the source state can only
30
For the improper argument position λy giving rise to the reflexive anaphor, see note 23
31
There are, of course, implicatures arising from the delimitation for five minutes, but that is a differ-
ent issue which I'll leave aside here.
32
For the sake of completeness, it might be noted that the implication required by (41) holds trivi-
ally, even if BECOME is ignored.
33
As Änderung is a regular derivation, it presumably does not require a separate lexical entry. (58)
furthermore leaves aside the relation to the causative variant of ändern (included in (35) above),
which would show up in cases like seine überraschende Änderung der Liste (his changing the list
surprisingly). - It should be noted, though, that applying (42) to (58) to introduce the presupposed
state would give (ii), if the definition (i) for DIFFERENT given in fn. 22 is taken into account:
(i) [ DIFFERENT χ ] = d c f 3 ( P , s) [ { s : [ Ρ χ ] } - . [ Ρ χ ] ]
(ii) / änder-ung / [ +N ] (λχ) X e [ { s z > c e & s : [ P x ] } [ e : BECOME -, [ Ρ χ ] ] ] ]
This correctly specifies the (result of the) change as cancellation of some property Ρ that held of χ
before.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-42-320.jpg)
![The event structure of CA USE and BECOME 35
(65) Paul left for three hours. Two hours are already over.
It might be noted in conclusion that the issues of event and state reference of BECOME must
not be confused with the intriguing problem of complex temporal frames and other condi-
tions, as shown in (66):
(66) Vor zwei Jahren in Paris bin ich drei Wochen lang jeden Tag zwei Stunden ins Mu-
seum gegangen.
Two years ago in Paris, I went for three weeks every day two hours to the museum
How the event reference of inchoatives (and other expressions) is taken up by complex
frames of this sort is a problem of its own.
7. The event structure o f CAUSE
As noted above, CAUSE is a functor relating two propositions, specifying a cause and its
effect, respectively. For the sake of illustration, consider the entry (35), collapsing the
causative and inchoative reading of ändern (change), repeated here as (67):
(67) / änder- / [ +V ] λχ λy λβ [ e : [ ( [ ACT y] [ CAUSE )[ BECOME [ DIFFERENT Χ ] ] ] ] ]
The cause is specified by [ ACT y ], the effect is specified by [ BECOME [ DIFFERENT Χ ] ],
which determines either a change or - under appropriate conditions - its result. As borne
out by (68a) and (68b), this option carries over from inchoatives to causatives:
(68) a. Sie haben den Plan gestern geändert.
They changed the schedule yesterday
b. Sie haben den Plan fur fünf Tage geändert.
They changed the schedule for five days
Before looking into the event structure of CAUSE more closely, I will sketch its truth-
conditional properties. A widely accepted view on this matter has been proposed in Dowty
(1979). The proposal is based on the notion of causal factor: φ is a causal factor for ψ if φ
necessarily implies ψ and ψ would not hold without φ. With this proviso, the following
truth-condition for CAUSE can be formulated:39
39
Actually, Dowty provides a more sophisticated characterization of "causal factor", based on the
notion of causal dependence of ψ on φ, and φ is a causal factor for ψ, if and only if a sequence of
causal dependencies connects φ with ψ. Similarly, the intuitive notion of a more remote causal
factor has a more technical characterization in Dowty's original definition:
(i) [φ CAUSE ψ ] is true if and only if (i) φ is a causal factor for ψ, and (ii) for all other φ', such that
φ' is also a causal factor for ψ, some -^φ-world is as similar or more similar to the actual world
than any other —ιφ'-world is.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-46-320.jpg)
![36 Manfred Bierwisch
(69) [φ CAUSE ψ ] is true if and only if
(i) φ is a causal factor for ψ, and
(ii) any other causal factor φ' for ψ is more remote than φ.
Concerning the event structure related to CAUSE, the properties and dependencies of three
eventualities are at issue (cf. (36) above):40
(70) a. the cause em, characterized by φ
b. the effect β|, characterized by ψ
c. the causation en, specified as [φ CAUSE ψ ]
As shown in (68), the effect of the causation can be an event or a state, an alternative that
need not be due to the particular status of BECOME in the effect-proposition. Thus (71a) is
naturally interpreted as the causation of an event, (71b) is the causation of a process, and
(71c) indicates the causation of a state:
(71) a. The truck broke the fence rapidly
b. The truck moved the cart quite a while very slowly
c. The students held the rope straight for at least two hours.
What might be less obvious is the observation that the structure of the effect determines
conceptually the homogeneous or non-homogeneous nature of the causation. To put it dif-
ferently: The causation of an event is an event, while the causation of a state or process is a
state or process. This might appear paradoxical at first glance, as one would expect the
effect to be determined by the cause, rather the other way round. But notice that here we
talk about the interdependence of causation and the effect it gives rise to, rather than the
dependence of the effect on its cause. According to this consideration, it would be a natural
conclusion that the causation as a whole and its effect are open for the same range of modi-
fiers. As cases like (71) indicate, the modification is just not specialized in this respect. This
would be a natural consequence of the assumption that the causation en and the effect ei are
not available for separate event reference. Notice that this accounts automatically for cases
like (68), where the event- or state-interpretation of BECOME in ändern carries over from the
effect to the causation.
So far, the assumption that BECOME should not overtly provide multiple event-reference
seems to carry over to CAUSE: causation and effect are not accessed by separate event-
variables.41
What must be clarified, however, is the status of the cause em. That cause and
For the present concerns, the intuitive notion that the cause of an eventuality can be specified as
the closest possible causal factor will be sufficient.
40
It should be noted that this is fully in line with Dowty's definition, as he explicitly considers cau-
sation as a relation between eventualities, specified by the propositions they instantiate.
41
This applies not only to the temporal structure of the eventualities involved but also to other as-
pects, for reasons to which we will return shortly. Roughly speaking, the causation en does not ex-
hibit a modality independently from the cause em.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/85246-250406091718-337443da/85/Event-Arguments-Foundations-and-Applications-Claudia-Maienborn-47-320.jpg)
Event Arguments Foundations and Applications Claudia Maienborn
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- 6. Linguistische Arbeiten 5 0 1 Herausgegeben von Hans Altmann, Peter Blumenthal, Klaus von Heusinger, Ingo Plag, Beatrice Primus und Richard Wiese
- 8. Event Arguments: Foundations and Applications Edited by Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wöllstein Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 2005
- 9. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. ISBN 3-484-30501 -0 ISSN 0344-6727 © Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2005 Ein Unternehmen der K. G. Saur Verlag GmbH, München http://www. niemeyer. de Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Druck: Laupp & Göbel GmbH, Nehren Einband: Industriebuchbinderei Nadele, Nehren
- 10. Contents Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wöllstein Introduction 1 Section I: Events - states - causation Manfred Bierwisch The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 11 Stefan Engelberg Stativity, supervenience, and sentential subjects 45 Anita Mittwoch Do states have Davidsonian arguments? Some empirical considerations 69 Kay-Eduardo Gonzalez- Vilbazo and Eva-Maria Remberger Ser and estar: The syntax of stage level and individual level predicates in Spanish 89 Horst Lohnstein Sentence connection as quantificational structure 113 Section II: Event nominals Artemis Alexiadou Gerund types, the present participle and patterns of derivation 139 Ingrid Kaufmann Referential arguments of nouns and verbs 153 Section III: Events in composition Angelika Kratzer Building resultatives 177 Daniel Hole Reconciling "possessor" datives and "beneficiary" datives - Towards a unified voice account of dative binding in German 213 Werner Abraham Event arguments and modal verbs 243
- 11. vi Contents Section IV: Measuring events Patrick Caudal and David Nicolas Types of degrees and types of event structures 277 Regine Eckardt Too poor to mention: Subminimal events and negative polarity items 301 Kimiko Nakanishi Semantic properties of split topicalization in German 331 Author index 357 Subject index 361
- 12. Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wöllstein Introduction Since entering the linguistic stage in the late sixties, Davidsonian event arguments have taken on an important role in linguistic theorizing. The central claim of Donald Davidson's seminal (1967) work "The logical form of action sentences" is that events are spatio- temporal things, i.e., concrete particulars with a location in space and time. This enrichment of the underlying ontology has proven to be of great benefit in explaining numerous combinatorial and inferential properties of natural language expressions. Among the many remarkable advances achieved within the Davidsonian paradigm since then figure most prominently the progress made in the theoretical description of verb semantics, including tense and aspect, and the break through in analyzing adverbial modification. Numerous monographs and collections attest to the extraordinary fertility of the Davidsonian program; see, e.g., Rothstein (1998), Tenny & Pustejovsky (2000), Higginbotham, Pianesi & Varzi (2000), Lang, Maienborn & Fabricius-Hansen (2003), Austin, Engelberg & Rauh (2004) to mention just a few more recent collections. In the course of the evolution of the Davidsonian paradigm, two moves have turned out to be particularly influential in terms of expanding and giving new direction to this overall approach. These are, first, the "Neo-Davidsonian turn" introduced by Higginbotham (1985, 2000) and Parsons (1990, 2000), and, secondly, Kratzer's (1995) merger of event semantics with the stage-level/individual-level distinction. The neo-Davidsonian approach has lately developed into kind of a standard for event semantics. It is basically characterized by two largely independent assumptions. The first assumption concerns the arity of verbal predicates. While Davidson introduced event arguments as an additional argument of (some) verbs, neo-Davidsonian accounts take the event argument of a verbal predicate to be its only argument. The relation between events and their participants is accounted for by the use of thematic roles. The second neo- Davidsonian assumption concerns the distribution of event arguments. They are considered to be much more widespread than originally envisaged by Davidson. Hence, neo- Davidsonian approaches typically assume that it is not only (action) verbs that introduce Davidsonian event arguments, but also adjectives, nouns, and prepositions. Thus, nowadays event arguments are widely seen as a trademark for predicates in general.1 The second milestone in the development of the Davidsonian program is Kratzer's (1995) event semantic treatment of the so-called stage-level/individual-level distinction, which goes back to Carlson (1977) and, as a precursor, Milsark (1974, 1977). Stage-level predicates (SLPs) express - roughly speaking - temporary or accidental properties, whereas A note on terminology: Bach (1986) coined the term "eventuality" for the broader notion of events, which includes, besides events proper, i.e., accomplishments and achievements in Vendler's (1967) terms, also processes and states. Other labels for event arguments in the broad sense are, e.g., "spatiotemporal location" (Kratzer 1995), "Davidsonian argument" (Chierchia 1995), or "E-position" (Higginbotham 1985).
- 13. 2 Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wöllstein individual-level predicates (ILPs) express (more or less) permanent or inherent properties.2 On Kratzer's (1995) account, the SLP/ILP-distinction basically boils down to the presence or absence of an extra event argument. Stage-level predicates are taken to have an additional event argument, while individual-level predicates lack such an extra argument. This difference in argument structure is then exploited syntactically by the assumption of different subject positions for SLPs and ILPs; see Diesing (1992). Since then interest has been directed towards the role of event arguments at the syntax/semantics interface and the impact they have on syntax proper in terms of, e.g., event phrases. All in all, Davidsonian event arguments have become a very familiar "all-purpose" linguistic instrument over the past decades, and recent years have seen a continual extension of possible applications far beyond the initial focus on verb semantics and adverbials. These developments are accompanied by a newly found interest in the linguistic and ontological foundation of events. To the extent that more attention is paid to less typical events than the classical 'Jones buttering a toast' or 'Brutus stabbing Caesar', which always come to the Davidsonian semanticist's mind first, there is a growing awareness of the vagueness and incongruities lurking behind the notion of events and its use in linguistic theorizing. A particularly controversial case in point is the status of states. The question of whether state expressions can be given a Davidsonian treatment analogous to process and event expressions (in the narrow sense) is still open for debate; see Maienborn (2005) and the commentaries to this target article for some of the pros and cons. The present volume grew out of a workshop "Event arguments in syntax, semantics and discourse" that the editors organized in February 26-28, 2003, in Munich (as part of the annual meeting of the German association for linguistics, DGfS), and in which we invited contributions geared towards drawing an interim balance of the use of and motivation for event arguments in linguistic theory. The articles presented here offer proposals towards this end from different empirical and theoretical perspectives. The leading question shared by the majority of the articles could be phrased in the following way. How do lexical semantics, syntax, and pragmatics conspire to project event structure? Discussing a wide range of linguistic phenomena (mostly pertaining to English, German and Romance) the articles (a) supply fresh evidence for the virtually ubiquitous presence of event arguments in linguistic structure; (b) they provide new, event-based, solutions as superior alternatives to already existing analyses; and/or (c) they shed new light on the nature of event arguments and the way these are handled by the linguistic machinery. 2 See, e.g., Higginbotham & Ramchand (1997), Jäger (2001) for overviews of the linguistic phe- nomena that have been associated with the stage-level/individual-level distinction.
- 14. Introduction 3 The volume is organized into four sections: Events - states - causation; Event nominals; Events in composition; Measuring events. Section I: Events - states - causation addresses mainly foundational issues concerning the nature of events and states, how they relate to causation, and how they show up in the linguistic structure. Manfred Bierwisch discusses the anchoring and accessibility of event arguments in semantic structure. He compares the different ways in which event arguments are structurally anchored in Davidsonian, neo-Davidsonian, and Reichenbachian approaches and presents arguments in favor of the latter variant. Bierwisch then goes on to argue that, no matter how complex a verb's internal event structure might be, only the highest event argument is made accessible for reference, quantification, modification, etc. This means, in particular, that inchoative and causative verbs will never project a target state into their argument structure. Apparent counterevidence as provided by durational adverbials, which obviously serve to specify the duration of an inchoative's target state, is accounted for by assuming that the operator BECOME is of an elusive nature. That is, target state modification of inchoatives relies on the improper absence of BECOME. Stefan Engelberg draws attention to one of the classes of verbs that do not fit easily into the Davidsonian picture, namely dispositional verbs such as German helfen (help), gefährden (endanger), erleichtern (facilitate). These verbs may have an eventive or a Stative reading depending on whether the subject is nominal or sentential. Trying to account for their readings within the Davidsonian program turns out to be challenging in several respects and provides new insights into the different nature of events and states. Engel- berg advocates the philosophical concept of supervenience as a useful device to account for the evaluative rather than causal dependency of the effect state expressed by these verbs. The proper analysis of state expressions is taken up again by Anita Mittwoch. She examines the arguments raised by Katz (2000, 2003) and Maienborn against extending the Davidsonian approach to (all) state expressions and rejects most of them, thereby corroborating the general neo-Davidsonian approach. On this view, states, rather than being different things, are merely somewhat poor examples of event(ualitie)s. Engelberg's and Mittwoch 's considerations concerning the ontological nature of states are supplemented by an article on the syntax of copular state expressions. Kay-Eduardo Gonzälez-Vilbazo and Eva-Maria Remberger present a minimalist account of the Spanish copula forms ser and estar, which figure as lexical exponents of the stage- level/individual-level distinction. Ser and estar are analyzed as syntactic default strategies (last resort) that are introduced into the derivation at different functional layers: tense (T°) and predication (Pr°). Motivation for this comes from current semantic analyses of the ser/estar alternation for which the authors strive for a more transparent syntactic correlation. Finally, causality is taken up again by Horst Lohnstein, who proposes a uniform account of the semantics of clause-connectives (while, if, when, because etc.) in terms of an invariant quantificational structure whose components are subject to parametrization. Lohnstein shows how different interpretive effects as, e.g., the temporal vs. adversative reading of German während (while/whereas) can be derived in this framework.
- 15. 4 Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wöllstein Section II: Event nominals presents a syntactic and a lexicalist approach towards an analysis of the argument structure of deverbal nominalizations. Artemis Alexiadou discusses nominal and verbal gerunds in English within the framework of Distributed Morphology suggesting that the different properties associated with these forms follow from different attachment sites of a nominal -ing affix. Whereas nominal gerunds result from attaching -ing directly to the verbal root, verbal gerunds result from combining -ing with AspectP. On Alexiadou's perspective, argument structure is derived syntactically via an event structure which in turn is introduced by a special type of functional layer in the syntax. Ingrid Kaufmann, instead, pursues a lexicalist approach according to which argument structure is basically determined at the level of lexical-semantic structure. Kaufmann's analysis is based on a corpus study of German nominalized infinitives showing that nominalized infinitives display two different patterns of argument realization whose distribution is determined by genuine semantic and pragmatic conditions. In order to account for these findings Kaufmann proposes an "ontological" solution according to which the two different patterns of nominalized infinitives differ in the way how the verb's event argument is referentially anchored. Section III: Events in composition focuses on the role of event arguments at the syntax/semantics interface. The studies aim at uncovering the combinatorial mechanisms that lead to the formation of complex event descriptions. Angelika Kratzer develops a novel analysis of German and English adjectival resultatives along the lines of serial verb constructions. In expressions like to drink my teapot dry the adjective is taken to combine with an empty CAUSE-affix. The resulting causing event is identified with the event expressed by the verb via the combinatorial operation of Event Identification. Kratzer succeeds in showing (a) how several syntactic and semantic properties of resultative constructions can be derived from her analysis and (b) that the direct object in a resultative construction is not a true argument of the verb but always starts out from within the adjectival phrase. Working within Kratzer's framework, Daniel Hole proposes an analysis of possessor and beneficiary datives in German that extends Kratzer's Event Identification into a more general combinatorial operation, called Variable Identification. This mechanism serves to augment an event description by an additional thematic argument that will be bound by an already existing argument. Thus, operations like Event Identification and Hole's dative- induced Variable Identification can be seen as a specific implementation of the neo- Davidsonian program of building up complex event descriptions from a maximally coherent conjunction of a set of smaller predications. Werner Abraham is concerned with the deontic and epistemic readings of modal verbs in the Germanic languages. Putting special emphasis on their Aktionsart-sensitivity, Abraham suggests to account for the polyfunctionality of modal verbs by assuming a control analysis for the deontic reading and a raising analysis for the epistemic read- ing. This syntactic analysis is correlated with a semantic analysis according to which epistemic modal verbs inherit both the theta properties and the event characteristics of the embedded full verbs, whereas deontic modal verbs project event and thematic arguments of their own.
- 16. Introduction 5 Finally, Section IV: Measuring events provides a particularly clear picture of the many ways in which event arguments can be involved in measuring expressions. Patrick Caudal and David Nicolas explore the relationship between degree structure and event structure by an analysis of various degree adverbials. Differences in distribution and interpretation are accounted for by assuming different types of degree scales. Degree modifiers like partially, completely act as modifiers on quantity scales, whereas extremely, perfectly and the like act as modifiers on intensity scales. The proposal rests on the assumption that most verbal predicates, including Stative predicates, can receive a degree argument, either for inherent lexical reasons, or by virtue of their structural context. On this basis, Caudal and Nicolas introduce a new - and broader - characterization of (a)telicity in terms of a mapping between degrees and events. Regine Eckardt draws attention to negative polarity items such as bat an eyelash, lift a finger, which serve to single out events of a particularly insignificant size. Eckardt develops an event-based variant of the pragmatic approach to NPI licensing proposed by Krifka (1995), showing that her event-based variant has several advantages compared to Krifka's event-free original account. On Eckardt's analysis, the respective NPIs turn out to be a special kind of adverbial modifier denoting functions from event predicates to event predicates. Weak NPIs map event predicates to the minimal events in their extension whereas strong NPIs yield so-called subminimal events, i.e., events that are even below the extension of an event predicate. Besides accounting for the different licensing contexts for weak and strong negative polarity items, Eckardt's approach also offers new insights into the ontology of events in terms of mereological structure. Finally, Kimiko Nakanishi examines measure phrases that are separated from their host NP in German split topicalizations as opposed to measure phrases that are adjacent to their host NP. Nakanishi proposes to account for their different semantic properties in terms of different domains of measurement. Whereas the non-split case involves the measurement of individuals in the nominal domain, measure phrases in split topicalizations are analyzed as a means of measuring events in the verbal domain. Several semantic restrictions on split measure phrases such as the incompatibility with single-occurrence events, the incompati- bility with individual-level predicates, and the unavailability of collective readings follow from monotonicity constraints applying to the verbal domain. In their entirety, the articles collected here offer a representative overview of the questions, assumptions and strategies that are presently being pursued in the further development of the Davidsonian program. Our aim is that they will offer further impulses to work in this area. We wish to thank all the authors for their enthusiasm and cooperation during all stages traversed along the way from the DGfS conference to the publication of this volume. We are particularly grateful to those who agreed to review one or more of the submitted papers: Artemis Alexiadou, Manfred Bierwisch, Miriam Butt, Patrick Caudal, Regine Eckardt, Stefan Engelberg, Werner Frey, Kay-Eduardo Gonzalez-Vilbazo, Daniel Hole, Gerhard Jäger, Graham Katz, Ingrid Kaufmann, Manfred Krifka, Ewald Lang, Jürgen Lenerz, Jörg Meibauer, Anita Mittwoch, Kimiko Nakanishi, David Nicolas, Susan Olsen, Luis Paris, Christopher Pinon, Beatrice Primus, Irene Rapp, Eva-Maria Remberger, Barbara Stiebels, Thomas Ede Zimmermann.
- 17. 6 Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wöllstein Fabienne Fritzsche deserves special thanks for her competent help in formatting the manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank the team at Niemeyer, especially Brigitta Zeller and Wolfgang Herbst, for their helpfulness and expertise that have contributed to the successful completion of this volume. References Austin, Jennifer R., Stefan Engelberg & Gisa Rauh (eds.) (2004): Adverbials. The interplay between meaning, context, and syntactic structure. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins. Bach, Emmon (1986): "The Algebra of Events." - In: Linguistics and Philosophy 9, 1-16. Carlson, Gregory (1977).· Reference to kinds in English. - Doctoral dissertation, University of California. Chierchia, Gennaro (1995): "Individual predicates as inherent generics." - In: Gregory N. Carlson & Francis J. Pelletier (eds.): The generic book, 176-223. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davidson, Donald (1967): "The Logical Form of Action Sentences." - In: N. Resher (ed.): The Logic of Decision and Action. 81-95. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Diesing, Molly (1992): Indefinites. - Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Higginbotham, James (1985): "On Semantics." - In: Linguistic Inquiry 16, 547-593. (2000): "On Events in Linguistic Semantics." - In: J. Higginbotham, F. Pianesi & A. Varzi (eds.): Speaking of Events, 49-79. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higginbotham, James & Gillian Ramchand (1997): "The Stage-Level/Individual-Level Distinction and the Mapping Hypothesis." - In: Oxford University Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics 2, 53-83. Higginbotham, James, Fabio Pianesi & Achille C. Varzi (eds.) (2000): Speaking of Events. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jäger, Gerhard (2001): "Topic-Comment Structure and the Contrast between Stage Level and Individual Level Predicates." - In: Journal of Semantics 18, 83-126. Katz, Graham (2000): "Anti Neo-Davidsonianism: Against a Davidsonian Semantics for State Sentences." - In: C. Tenny & J. Pustejovsky (eds.): Events as Grammatical Objects, 393-416. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. (2003): "Event arguments, adverb selection, and the Stative Adverb Gap." - In: E. Lang, C. Maienborn & C. Fabricius-Hansen (eds.): Modifying Adjuncts, 455-474. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kratzer, Angelika (1995): "Stage-level and individual-level predicates as inherent generics." - In: G. N. Carlson & F. J. Pelletier (eds.): The Generic Book, 125-175. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Krifka, Manfred (1995): "The semantics and pragmatics of polarity items." - In: Linguistic Analysis 25, 209-257. Lang, Ewald, Claudia Maienbom, & Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (eds.) (2003): Modifying Adjuncts. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Maienbom, Claudia (2005): "On the limits of the Davidsonian approach. The case of copula sentences." - To appear in: Theoretical Linguistics 31/3. Milsark, Gary L. (1974): Existential Sentences in English. - Doctoral dissertation, MIT. - (1977): "Toward an Explanation of Certain Peculiarities of the Existential Construction in English." - Linguistic Analysis 3, 1-29.
- 18. Introduction 7 Parsons, Terence (1990): Events in the Semantics of English. A Study in Subatomic Semantics. - Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press. - (2000): "Underlying States and Time Travel." In: J. Higginbotham, F. Pianesi & A.Varzi (eds.): Speaking of Events, 81-93. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rothstein, Susan (ed.) (1998): Events and Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Tenny, Carol & James Pustejovsky (eds.) (2000): Events as Grammatical Objects. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Vendler, Zeno (1967): Linguistics in Philosophy. - Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
- 20. Section I: Events - states - causation
- 22. Manfred Bierwisch The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME Adopting the widely held view that verbs are predicates of events or states and refer to situations or eventualities, the present paper explores consequences of this assumption for the structure of in- choative and causative verbs. Inchoatives like aufaachen (wake up) are supposed to be semanti- cally characterized by the operator BECOME, causatives like wecken (wake up) by the operator CAUSE. While BECOME specifies the transition from a source state to a target state, CAUSE identifies the causal connection between a cause and its effect, the latter often specified by an event of the inchoative sort. The paper argues that, with respect to its syntactically based compositional inter- pretation, a verb refers to one and only one state or event, irrespective of the complex structure of causatives and inchoatives involving causation, cause, effect, transition, source-, and target-state. Technically, the event-reference of a verb is based on the highest position in its argument struc- ture. This position absorbs (or unifies with) the qualification represented by (extensional) modifi- ers, as in I woke him up at nine by a phone call. Comparing the status of the fact variable proposed by Reichenbach with the event variable introduced by Davidson, Reichenbach's referential opera- tor is argued to provide the more appropriate analysis for compositionally complex verbs. Further problems created by the "Neo-Davidsonian" variant of argument structure are argued to provide additional motivation for the view adopted here. The analysis proposed for verbs carries over to event nouns, as shown by the parallel structure of the change of the schedule last week and the schedule changed last week. Apparent counterexam- ples are related to durational adverbials like for two weeks, which are usually supposed to be in- compatible with proper events. But they are compatible with inchoatives in cases like the schedule changed for two weeks. In these cases, however, the adverbial clearly specifies the duration of the target state, rather than the duration of the event. The paper shows how this effect derives from the proposed analysis, if independently motivated assumptions about the status of BECOME are added. 1. The problem The fairly trivial observation that natural language expressions are about situations, or more specifically states, events, and processes, raises non-trivial questions concerning the refer- ence to situations and its proper analysis. Current proposals for dealing with these questions derive in one way or the other from Reichenbach (1947) or Davidson (1967). Both accounts are based on the assumption that a proposition ρ is to be enriched by an additional variable e which establishes the reference to a situation which is characterized by p. The technical details of the two proposals are different, but for a wide range of problems their conse- quences are the same and their representations can be translated into each other, as we will see. Both approaches are primarily concerned with the logical form and semantic interpreta- tion of linguistic expressions, paying only marginal attention to the question of how the relevant representations are built up syntactically, and which role in particular the situation
- 23. 12 Manfred Bierwisch or event variables play within the morpho-syntactic structure of linguistic expressions. Against this background, I will be concerned in this paper with the following questions: A Which of the semantic event variables are syntactically accessible, and how? Β Which effects of event variables can be assigned to their syntactic and semantic selection restrictions? Question A presupposes that semantic variables are accessible for syntactic specification, assuming that this is in fact the function of theta roles a head assigns to its syntactic com- plements, and it queries which event variables may realize a function of that sort in which way. Question Β presupposes that it is by means of theta roles that a head realizes its se- mantic restrictions and morpho-syntactic or categorial requirements, called s-selection and c-selection, respectively, and it raises the non-trivial question of whether event variables, which are not normally specified by syntactic complements, can be associated with selec- tion restrictions, and what their effects may be. These relevant issues will be pursued with respect to the semantic predicates CAUSE and BECOME and their combinations appearing in lexical items like close, kill, change etc. I will adopt the basic assumptions about these elements developed in Dowty (1979), extended by proposals discussed a.o. in Bierwisch (2002, 2003). The problems to be faced are illustrated by cases like these: (1) a. He woke up for a while, but then he slept quietly for hours. b. Mach am Abend bitte ein paar Minuten das Fenster auf. In the evening, please open the window for a few minutes. c. Yesterday, he came quite a while to my office. According to standard and in fact well motivated assumptions, events denoted by verbs like open, come, wake up etc. can be temporally located by adverbials such as yesterday, then, in the evening, etc, but they cannot be modified by durational adverbials like for hours, (for) quite a wile, afew minutes, which combine freely with processes and states like sleep, rest, or wait. In (la) however, durational adverbials combine with the event wake up as well as the state sleep. In (lb), moreover, the same event denoted by aufmachen (open) seems to be modified by the temporal adverbial in the evening and the durative adverbial a few min- utes. In a similar vein, come is modified by both yesterday and quite a while in (lc). On closer inspection, one has to note, however, that the temporal adverbs locate the event in question, while the durational adverbs qualify the resulting state, rather than the event. Similarly, the durative adverbial for a while modifying wake up in (la) specifies only the state of being awake. This illustrates the problem to be pursued here, viz. the question of how events and states and their properties are to be systematically accounted for. Some remarks about background assumptions needed to deal with these problems seem to be in point.
- 24. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 13 2. Background assumptions Linguistic expressions relate a Phonetic Form PF to the representation of its meaning, the linguistic aspect of which is called Logical Form or Semantic Form SF.1 Hence a linguistic expression is a pair <PF, SF>, where PF determines its pronunciation and SF its conceptual interpretation. Each expression is furthermore categorized by syntactic and morphological features Cat, classifying e.g. dreams as alternatively verb, present, and third person singu- lar, or as noun and plural. Finally, a linguistic expression is characterized by its Argument Structure AS, which consists of a hierarchically structured sequence of argument positions or theta roles, determining the properties of constituents the expression may or must com- bine with. In particular, the theta roles in AS impose conditions called s-selection and c- selection, determining the semantic and morpho-syntactic properties of expressions saturat- ing the theta role in question.2 Thus the theta role to be saturated by the subject of the Verb dreams requires semantically a human (or personal) entity and syntactically a nominative singular DP. These two types of constraints are naturally determined by the semantic aspect of the argument position and by morpho-syntactic features associated with it. More techni- cally, a theta role Θ, is a pair < λχ,, F,>, where λχ, abstracts over a variable in SF, and F, is a (possibly empty) set of features to be matched by the features in Cat of a constituent satu- rating 0j. The s-selection of 0j can now be understood as an effect of the predicates apply- ing to Xj in SF, while the c-selection is due to features that follow from grammatical rules or principles, or are specified by lexical idiosyncrasy. A preliminary illustration of the as- sumptions sketched so far is given in (2), the lexical entry for the German temporal preposi- tion nach (after), which differs grammatically from the directional preposition nach (to- wards) by the categorization [ - Directional] : [ Τ y > Τ χ ] SF As indicated in (2), Cat and AS constitute jointly what one might call the Grammatical Form GF of a linguistic expression, because Cat and AS together determine essentially its grammatically controlled combinatorial potential. On the other hand, AS and SF together 1 I need not go here into details related to the terminological decision. While LF, as used in Chom- sky (1981) and subsequent work, is primarily concerned with syntactically determined aspects of meaning, SF is concerned also with the (grammatically relevant) internal structure of lexical items determining their contribution to the meaning (or conceptual interpretation) of linguistic expres- sions. For some discussion of these matters and the overlap in orientation between LF and SF see Bierwisch (1997). As I am concerned here with issues that clearly relate to word-internal condi- tions of semantic representation, I will take SF to provide the relevant representational format. 2 The terminology - semantic or s-selection and categorial or c-selection - is due to Chomsky (1986), where selectional restrictions were not formally associated with theta roles, however. (2) / nach / [-V,-N,-Dir] λχ λy [+Obl] PF Cat AS GF
- 25. 14 Manfred Bierwisch can be considered as the Extended Semantic Form ESF, according to which e.g. a preposi- tion like nach is a two-place relation.3 This will turn out to be crucial for the semantic combinations an expression may enter into. Within the SF of (2), Τ is a functor that assigns a time interval to its argument, and the two place predicate > represents an ordering-relation over the set of time intervals. Hence χ and y are variables over individuals susceptible to ordering in time. Hence the s-selection associated with both argument positions of nach requires entities to which a time interval can be assigned. The c-selection determined by the Object Position is expressed by the feature [+Oblique] requiring a Dative-DP.4 The other argument of nach - and of preposi- tions in general -, sometimes called the external or designated argument, does not specify features of c-selection, a point to which we will return. The conditions of s- and c-selection just mentioned must be met e.g. by the object of nach in a phrase like nach der Wahl (after the election). Suppose for the sake of illustration that something like (3) abbreviates the representation of the object-DP in question, where [DEF e [ ELECTION e ] ] identifies a defi- nite individual:5 (3) /der Wahl/ [+N,-V,+Obl ] [ DEFe[ELECTIONe] ] Merging (2) and (3) yields a PP with the representation indicated in (4), where the SF of (3) replaces the variable χ in (2) as an effect of lambda-conversion, triggered by the combina- tion of (2) and (3) through functional application: (4) / nach der Wahl / [-V,-Ν,-Dir] λγ[ Τ y > Τ [ DEF e [ ELECTION e ]] ] (4) illustrates in a rather simplified form the result of combining a head with its comple- ment. In addition to this type of combination called complementation, we need an account of the operation that merges a head with an adjunct, as e.g. in Besuch nach der Wahl (visit after the election), where nach der Wahl is a modifier, not a complement of the head Be- such. Abbreviating the representation of Besuch by (5), we get something like (6) as the result of merging a head with an adjunct: (5) /Besuch/ [+N,-V,...] λζ [VISITζ] 3 Technically, ESF is an expression in a so-called lambda-categorial language. Assuming that for principled reasons the SF of major syntactic constituents is to be construed as an expression of type t, i.e. as a proposition, ESF becomes an η-place predicate with AS defining its arity, i.e. the number and type of its arguments. See Bierwisch (1997, 2003) for further discussion. 4 The feature [+Obl] is in fact predictable, being the default case for objects of prepositions in Ger- man. Hence it would not have to be specified in the entry (2). The principles and conditions con- trolling such regularities will largely be ignored in the present context, except where event posi- tions are involved. 5 This is, of course, an oversimplification in various respects. First, e must be construed as referring to a definite eventuality of the sort discussed in Bach (1986), a point to which we will return. Sec- ond, the definiteness operator DEF is actually a short-hand for a number of assumptions that cannot be discussed here. It must, however, provide a referential binding for the argument position of the Noun Wahl, turning it into a definite description, as will be discussed shortly.
- 26. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 15 (6) / Besuch nach der Wahl / [ +N, - V,... ] λ ζ [ [ VISIT Ζ ] & [ Τ Ζ > Τ [ DEF e [ ELECTION e ] ] ] ] What (6) is supposed to account for is the observation that head and modifier are semanti- cally combined by logical conjunction, and more specifically that the condition abbreviated by VISIT specifies an event that is additionally subject to the temporal location expressed by nach der Wahl. To this effect, the argument position λy of the adjunct (4) is absorbed by (or unified with) the argument position λζ of the head (5). As both operators abstract over the same sort of variables, the absorbing theta role does not violate the s-selection of the ab- sorbed Role, which furthermore does not impose c-selectional constraints that could be violated. Absorption of a theta role must furthermore be assumed to have two conse- quences: First, the SF of the adjunct is added to that of the head by logical conjunction &.6 Second, the variable bound by the absorbed operator is substituted by the variable of the absorbing operator. In the present case, λy is absorbed by λζ and y is substituted by z. This account of (extensional) modification follows essentially the proposal made in Higginbotham (1985). It must be generalized in non-trivial ways if e.g. intensional modifi- cation as in der angebliche Besuch (the alleged visit) is to be included, since an alleged visit is not something that is a visit and an alleged event. In Bierwisch (2003), I have argued that in head-adjunct-combinations the head characteristically absorbs a theta role, as opposed to head-complement-combinations, where the head discharges a theta role. We will return to these matters below. To sum up the framework sketched so far, we have lexical entries as sketched in (2), the argument structure of which specifies their s- and c-selectional properties as illustrated above. On the basis of these entries, syntactically complex expressions are created by the operation Merge as illustrated in (4) and (6) for complementation and adjunction, respec- tively. Merge combines two (basic or complex) expressions X and Y into a complex ex- pression Z. One ofZ's constituents is its head, determining its categorization. A provisional formulation of the properties of Merge is given in (7), presupposing that complex expres- sions have the same basic organization as lexical items. (7) Merge (X, Y) ==> Z, where a. PF of Ζ is the linear combination of PF of X and Y,7 b. Cat of Ζ is projected from Cat of X iff X is the head of Z, and either c. X discharges the lowest (i.e. next available) position of its AS to Y by functional application with subsequent lambda-conversion within SF, or d. Y discharges the lowest position in its AS to X by lambda-absorption, followed by logical conjunction of the SF of X and Y. 6 For principled reasons, discussed e.g. in Wunderlich (2000) and Bierwisch (2002), the conjunction & is asymmetrical, at least in the sense that one conjunct is closer to the functor than the other. Whether and which semantic consequences are connected to this asymmetry need not concern us at the moment. 7 Two qualifications are to be made at this point. First, I will ignore here morphological processes with non-linear aspects of combination. Second, the linear ordering of head and complement or ad- junct is subject to complex conditions of various sorts that must be left aside here.
- 27. 16 Manfred Bierwisch (7c) and (7d) determine the argument structure and the Semantic Form of Ζ (i.e. the ESF as noted above) under complementation and adjunction, respectively, where (7d) covers only extensional modification and is thus in need of further elaboration. As a consequence, con- ditions of s- and c-selection are imposed either according to (7c) by the head on the com- plement, or according to (7d) by the adjunct on the head.8 3. Some aspects of event arguments Within this framework, the status of argument positions providing event reference is to be made explicit in two steps. First, as noted initially, an event variable, originally proposed as "fact variable" in Reichenbach (1947) and reinvented, in a somewhat different guise, in Davidson (1967), is assumed to explicitly represent states and events as entities in SF. The formal ontology of the values to be assigned to this variable is developed in Bach (1986).9 The second step takes up the notion of a referential theta role, proposed in Williams (1981) and elaborated in Higginbotham (1985), and others. Originally, Williams considered this type of role as characteristic for nouns, creating the basis for reference and quantification as in this man, every book, some problems etc.10 In Higginbotham (1985) and Bierwisch (1988) it was also taken as the basis for extensional modification, as sketched in (6) and (7d). With these prerequisites, it is a natural move to assume that verbs refer to events in roughly the same way in which nouns are assumed to refer to individuals to be assumed for nouns. The point is illustrated by the parallel between (8) and (9) compared to (10): (8) a. Sie ändern den Fahrplan. They change the schedule. b. Sie ändern häufig/oft den Fahrplan. They often change the schedule. c. Sie ändern am Montag den Fahrplan. On Monday, they change the schedule. 8 It might be added that Merge is deliberately based on the operation Merge as introduced e.g. in Chomsky (1995), with the following amendments: (i) Merge as defined in (7) does not project the full set of features of the head, but only those in Cat, (ii) it does not only merge the phonetic and syntactic information but also the information in ESF, thereby realizing the selection restrictions. 9 For the time being, I will ignore the much debated difference between events and states, both covered by what Bach called "eventualities". 10 It must be noted that the notion of Referential Role is crucially different from that of agent, theme, goal etc., although Williams (1981) is not quite clear in this respect. While agent, theme, etc. are supposed to relate somehow to the conceptual content of an argument position, referentiality has to do exclusively with the way in which variables relate to the domain of interpretation. In fact, agent, theme, patient, etc. all can become referential roles, as e.g. in murderer, proposal, em- ployee, which are referential by means of the agent, theme, and patient role, respectively.
- 28. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 17 (9) a. Der Fahrplan ändert sich. The schedule changes. b. Der Fahrplan ändert sich häufig/oft. The schedule changes often/frequently. c. Der Fahrplan ändert sich am Montag. On Monday, the schedule changes. (10) a. Die Änderung des Fahrplans The change of the schedule b. Die häufige/*oft Änderung des Fahrplans The frequent change of the schedule c. Die Änderung des Fahrplans am Montag The change of the schedule on Monday Besides the specification of reference by means of tense and complementizer or determiner, the event-reference is parallel for the causative verb, the inchoative verb, and the noun, both in German ändern, sich ändern, and Änderung and in English verb and noun change. Also, frequency and temporal modifiers apply to verbal and nominal heads in the same way. The fact that oft and often are restricted to verbal heads, while häufig can modify verbs as well as nouns, is due to c-selection by the adjunct, with oft imposing something like [ +V ]." Furthermore, the event reference of verbs can enter standard anaphoric relations and may be picked up by appropriate pronouns, as shown by the italicized elements in (11): (11) a. Sie ändern häufig den Fahrplan. Das macht viel Ärger. b. Sie ändern häufig den Fahrplan, was viel Ärger macht. c. They change the schedule frequently, that/which is very irritating. Again, this is essentially parallel to the referential character of nouns, with the anaphoric relations based on their referential argument, as shown in (12): (12) a. Er kritisiert die häufige Änderung des Fahrplans. Sie macht viel Ärger. b. Er kritisiert die häufige Änderung des Fahrplans, die viel Ärger macht. c. He criticizes the frequent change of the schedule, which/it is disappointing. As already noted, c-selection imposed by morpho-syntactic features of adjuncts can restrict them to verbal heads - as in oft (often), heute (today),jetzt (now) - or to nominal heads - as in häufig (frequently), heutig (today's), or jetzig (present). The familiar semantic restric- tions, on the other hand, based on s-selection and depending on the content of SF, carry over from verbs to nouns, preventing (proper) events from durational modifiers like for '1 A different, but comparable condition on c-selection restricts heute (today), gestern (yesterday), damals (then), bald (soon) and others to verbal heads, as opposed to heutig, gestrig, damalig, baldig modifying nominal heads. A closely related distinction is realized more systematically (but not without exceptions) by the English suffix -ly . For further discussion of this point see Bier- wisch (2003).
- 29. 18 Manfred Bierwisch hours, and states from delimitations like quickly, or within a few minutes, as indicated in (13) and (14).12 (13) a. Das Haus wurde {wiederholt/*stundenlang/ziemlich rasch} zerstört. The house was {repeatedly/*for hours/rather quickly} destroyed, b. Die {wiederholte/*stundenlange/ziemlich rasche} Zerstörung des Hauses. The {repeated/rather quick} destruction of the house {*for hours}. (14) a. Das Haus wurde {gestern/stundenlang/*ziemlich rasch} beobachtet. The house was observed {yesterday/for hours/*rather quickly}. b. Die {gestrige/stundenlange/*ziemlich rasche} Beobachtung des Hauses. The {*rather quick} observation of the house {yesterday/for hours}. Event variables cannot only enter anaphoric relations, they are also subject to quantifica- tion, with frequency adverbials like always, often, occasionally, seldom, etc. acting as quan- tifiers over eventualities. Thus the Logical or Semantic Form of (15a) should be something like (15b), or slightly more formally (15c): (15) a. The schedule changes frequently. b. There are many e such that e is a change of schedule. c. For many e [ the schedule changes (e) ] Quantification applies not only to events but just as well to states, if instances are separable, as in (16), where states are individuated by relevant occasions: (16) a. Die Leitung ist immer besetzt. The line is always busy, b. Peter wiegt selten zu viel. Peter seldom weighs too much. Participating in quantification, event variables can furthermore be involved in scope rela- tions. Thus the preferred reading of (17) assures that mail delivery occurrs regularly on Monday, not on other days. In other words, on Monday qualifies the regular delivery, i.e. it has scope over regularly. The preferred reading of (18), on the other hand, claims that on Monday the delivery of mail is regular, i.e. regular qualifies the delivery on Monday, and has, in this sense, scope over on Monday. (17) Die Post wird regelmäßig am Montag zugestellt. Mail is delivered regularly on Monday. 12 It should be noted that acceptability judgements can be obscured by a coerced, event-like interpre- tation of observe, such that e.g. they will observe the house in three hours is construed as they will start the observation of the house in three hours. But coercion of this sort confirms, rather than spoils the tenet that s-selection is based on semantic conditions. I will return to these matters in de- tail in section 7 and 8.
- 30. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 19 (18) Die Post wird am Montag regelmäßig zugestellt. On Monday, mail is delivered regularly. Whether and under which conditions the preferred interpretation can be replaced by other options need not concern us here. In part it is a matter of stress and focus-assignment, which must be left aside. The point to be made is merely that event variables cannot only be quantified - as in (15) and (16) -, but participate in standard relations of regular variables.13 4. Implementing event reference As already noted, event reference has been introduced into standard semantic (or logical) representations in different ways. The most direct proposal is due to Davidson (1967), who suggested that the main predicate of an action sentence is to be extended by an additional argument, which refers to the event characterized by the sentence in question. More techni- cally, a proposition of the general form (19) should in fact be analyzed as (20), where P' is an n+1 place predicate that relates Ρ and its arguments to the event e. (19) P(x,,...,xn ) (20) 3 e [ P ' ( e , x , , . . . , x n ) ] This proposal is illustrated in (21b), where the transitive verb butter of (21a) is analyzed as a three-place relation between e and the arguments of the verb. Past tense, provisionally indicated by T(e) < T(u), ordering e temporally before the utterance time T(u), and adver- bials like in the kitchen are now treated as predications of e, conjoined to the main proposi- lion.14 (21) a. Fred buttered the toast in the kitchen b. 3e [ buttering (e, Fred, the toast) & T(e) < T(u) & in the kitchen (e) ] Twenty years earlier, Reichenbach (1947) had already proposed a more general way to introduce event variables. Instead of adding an argument to the major predicate, Reichen- bach defined an event function [ ρ ]* which turns a proposition ρ into a property of events. Substituting in this function the proposition (19) for p, one gets (22), which corresponds to (19) very much like Davidson's (20) corresponds to the initial (19). 13 Scope variation of the sort illustrated in (17) and (18) does not carry over to nominalization, as shown by (i) as opposed to (ii). This is due to conditions of DP-syntax that are not to be pursued here. (i) the regular delivery of mail on Monday (ii) * the delivery of mail on Monday regular(ly) 14 The treatment of tense as a conjunct on a par with adjuncts must be modified for reasons to which we return. For the time being it simply indicates the specification imposed on e.
- 31. 20 Manfred Bierwisch (22) 3 e [ P ( x l s . . . , x n ) ] * ( e ) In these terms, the analysis of (21a) comes out as (23), with tense and adverbial modifica- tion represented again by conjoined propositions: (23) 3e [ [ buttering (Fred, the toast) ]*(e) & T(e) < T(u) & in the kitchen (e) ] Reichenbach's proposal is more general than Davidson's, as it introduces an event variable by a general event function15 , rather than by extending the arity of particular (classes of) predicates.16 It could thus apply to any proposition, including those specifying e.g. locative or temporal properties. This requires an empirically restricted occurrence of the event- function, ultimately converging with the specification needed for event arguments of the Davidsonian style. With this proviso, and ignoring certain consequences of the different theoretical contexts of the two proposals, Davidson's and Reichenbach's event variables are intended to account for roughly the same range of phenomena.17 In particular, both Rei- chenbach and Davidson represent adverbial modification by conjoined predications of the event argument, such that e.g. Fred buttered the toast follows from (21a) by the rules of standard logic. A rather different way to treat the event variable has been proposed a. o. by Parsons (1990). This so-called neo-Davidsonian theory replaces (19) by (24), turning Ρ into a one- place predicate P" of events to which the arguments of Ρ are then related by thematic rela- tions Rj!, (24) 3e [ P"(e) & R,(e, x,) & ... & Rn(e, xn) ] Thematic relations are taken from the usual set of theta roles like agent, theme, source, goal, etc. Under this proposal, the analysis of (21a) would come out as something like (25): (25) 3e [ buttering (e) & Agent(e, Fred) & Patient (e, the toast) & T(e) < T(u) & Location (e, the kitchen) ] The move from (19) to (24) is - in spite of the deceptive terminology - a radical defection from Davidson's original intention. Separating the core predicate from its original argu- ments has far-reaching and fatal consequences. I will briefly sketch three of them. 15 Reichenbach explicitly uses fact function and event function synonymously. The distinction be- tween facts on the one hand and events and states on the other made in Vendler (1967) and subse- quent discussions corresponds more (but not exactly) to the distinction Reichenbach makes be- tween objective or situational fact functions and propositional fact functions. 16 Davidson originally assumed event arguments for verbs of change and action. Later on, various extensions have been discussed by various authors, including e-arguments not only for state verbs but also for certain types of adjectives and heads of locative PPs. I will return to this matter below. 17 A hint to different notational variants appearing in the literature might be useful. In essentially the sense of Reichenbach's event function, Kamp & Reyle (1993) use the colon to associate a proposi- tion ρ with an event e, Wunderlich (2000) uses curly brackets, and Bierwisch (1988) an operator inst. Thus [p]*(e), e:p, {p}e, and e iNSTp all specify an event e instantiating a proposition p.
- 32. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 21 First, as shown by (25), arguments and adjuncts of a verb cannot differ with respect to their semantic effect: Both are conjuncts added in the same way to the event predication.18 Now, a major point in Davidson's treatment of events and adverbials was to provide a sys- tematic account for the inference from e.g. (26a) to (26b) by standard conjunction reduc- tion: (26) a. Fred met Eve in Paris. b. Fred met Eve. c. * Fred met in Paris. d. * Fred met. According to the neo-Davidsonian analysis, (26c) and even (26d) should be derivable by conjunction reduction in the same way, obviously a wrong conclusion without any empiri- cal justification. Notice that the deviance of (26c) and (26d) is not merely a matter of the syntactic surface, violating conditions of c-selection, but indicates rather a semantic defi- 19 ciency. The second point, directly related to this problem, concerns the fact that the number and type of arguments a predicate requires belong to its essential, intrinsic properties. The event expressed by the verb give, for instance, requires necessarily what is usually called an agent, a theme, and a recipient; it cannot get along with, say, an experiencer and a goal or just a theme. Similarly think needs an experiencer and a theme, while sleep requires an experiencer, but excludes a theme. This is not a matter of arbitrary incidences, but system- atically determined by the respective event predicates. That requires highly intricate sets of postulates, determining not only the required, but also the excluded thematic relations. Such postulates, which have never been considered by neo-Davidsonians in an even remotely adequate way, do nothing but supply information that has artificially been stripped away from the core predicates - an arbitrariness that becomes particularly obvious if one takes into account the internal structure of complex predicates of the sort to be looked at below. Third, representations of the neo-Davidsonian style are in conflict with requirements of standard logic in a much wider range of the cases than those illustrated in (26). They yield inappropriate results also in lots of other cases, notably with respect to negation. Thus ac- cording to (24), the representation of (27a) - ignoring tense - would be (27b), which is equivalent to (27c). 18 The basic distinction between arguments and adjuncts is not obviated by the fact that there are similarities or even borderline cases. Thus in Paris is a locative argument selected by stay in (i), it is a free locative adjunct in (ii), and something in between, often called argument-adjunct, option- ally selected by the noun stay in (iii). (i) He stayed in Paris (ii) He visited me in Paris (iii) his stay in Paris For some discussion of these similarities and borderline cases see Bierwisch (1988, 2003). The present problem is in no way affected by these phenomena. 19 It might be noted that these considerations apply also to the condition T(e) < T(u) indicating past tense in (25). This is one of the reasons requiring a different treatment of tense, as mentioned in fn.13.
- 33. 22 Manfred Bierwisch (27) a. He doesn't sell it. b. - 3 e [ sell (e) & Agent (e, he) & Theme (e, it) ] c. Ve [ -i sell (e) ν -, Agent (e, he) ν -, Theme (e, it)] According to normal understanding, (27a) is true if and only if there is no instance of his selling it, whatever he and it are apt to refer to. The three options by which (27a) could be falsified according to (27b) or (27c) are simply besides the point: There is no way to under- stand what it would mean that someone referred to by he is not the agent of the selling event e or something referred to by it is not the theme of that event, even if one ignores problems related to quantification over events.20 Notice that this is different for something like he doesn Ί sell it today, where the negation - in line with the original Davidsonian approach - can appropriately apply to the event of his selling it and to the temporal location of that event. These and a number of further points concerning the controversial nature of separated thematic roles strongly argue against the neo-Davidsonian approach. This leaves us with two possibilities to incorporate event reference into the notational system sketched in sec- tion 2. (28a) illustrates the Reichenbach-version of the verb sleep (using Kamp's ":" rather than Reichenbach's "[ ]*"), while (28b) follows Davidson's proposal, extending the prop- erty SLEEP into a relation between an individual and an event: (28) a. / sleep / [ +V, -Ν ] λχ λε [ e : [ SLEEP Χ ] ] b. / sleep / [ +V, -Ν ] λχ λε [ [ SLEEP' χ ] e ] Assuming that eventualities like individuals are elements of type e, the one-place predicate SLEEP in (28a) is of type (e, t), taking χ to build up a proposition of type t, and the colon : is formally an operator of type (t,{e, t)), turning a proposition into a predicate of events. The two-place predicate SLEEP' in (28b), on the other hand, is of type (e,(e, t)), turning two indi- viduals into a proposition. In both versions, both variables are bound by argument posi- tions, providing the subject position and the event reference, respectively. The difference between (28a) and (28b) is in one respect more than merely a notational variant, however. As the domain of eventualities includes events, processes, and states, the variable e is sub- ject to a sortal choice, depending in one way or the other on the predicate that takes e as its argument. In (28b) this choice is directly determined by the predicate SLEEP', while in (28a), it must somehow be proliferated from the property SLEEP to the argument of the event op- erator ":". I will return to this issue below. It is worth noting that corresponding to the verb sleep, we have the entry (29) for the event noun sleep, which differs merely by its categorization: (29) / sleep / [ -V, +N ] λχ λβ [ e : [ SLEEP χ ] ] 20 It must be emphasized that what is at issue are the propositions that he and it are agent and theme of e, not the identity of the individuals referred to. The identity of the individuals could be focused and negated, as in HE doesn't sell it (but his BROTHER). - This is barely possible for the object NP in (27), however, for independent reasons, preventing contrastive stress on it.
- 34. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 23 This difference has important consequences beyond the categorization as such, because argument positions differ systematically for nouns and verbs with respect to their syntactic properties. Thus, argument positions of nouns are generally optional, except for the referen- tial role, which happens to be the event position in (29). Hence λχ must be saturated by the subject in (28), but can be left unspecified in (29), as in the sleep last night, etc. In (29), as in lexical entries in general, the c-selectional properties associated with the argument positions (such as case requirements) are largely predictable by the categoriza- tion. Thus λχ requires nominative for the verb in (28), but (possessive) genitive for the noun in (29). See e.g. Bierwisch (1997) and Wunderlich (2000) for further discussion. Given the assumptions about SF sketched in section 2, the entry (28a) would now sup- port representations like (30b) and (31b), again with obvious simplifications in various respects: (30) a. Fred slept in the kitchen b . 3 e [ [ T e < T u ] [ e : [ SLEEP FRED ] & [ e IN [ DEF y [ KITCHEN y ] ] ] ] ] (31) a. Fred slept for an hour in the kitchen b . 3 e [ [ T e < T u ] [ e : [ SLEEP FRED ] & [ EXTENT e • 1 HOUR ] & [ LOC e IN [ DEF y [ KITCHEN y ] ] ] ] ] It must be added that (31b) is at best a first approximation, as it does not account for the relative scope of temporal and locative adverbials in relation to their syntactic position. 5. The event structure of inchoativity and causativity The verb sleep refers to a particular sort of state. The same type of state provides the source of the change referred to by the verb awake (and wake up) and also the target state of the inverse change referred to by fall asleep. The transitive variant of wake up furthermore exemplifies the possibility to add an agent identifying the source of the change denoted by the intransitive verb, a pattern characteristic for so-called ergative verbs like break, close, change, etc. Following familiar assumptions, deriving from McCawley (1973), Dowty (1979) and related work, grammatically relevant semantic relations within and between causative and inchoative verbs based on the state characterized by SLEEP can be represented as follows, with [ ACT y ] specifying the event which brings about the relevant change of state:21 21 Actually, the proposition [ ACT y ] used here and in the sequel is a shorthand in various respects. First, ACT must be construed as a predicate subsuming all sorts of appropriate activities by which the effect in question can be brought about. Thus ACT comes close to a variable ranging over activ- ity predicates. For a more detailed discussion of cause, effect, and causation see section 7 below. Second, ACT is treated as a predicate applying to an individual that provides the argument position of the agent, as exemplified in (i):
- 35. 24 Manfred Bierwisch (32) a. / sleep / [ +V ] λχ λε [ e : [ SLEEP χ ] ] b. / awake / [ +V ] λχ λβ [ e : [ BECOME -, [ SLEEP χ ] ] ] c. / awake / [ +V ] λχ λγ λε [ e : [ [ A C T y] [ C A U S E [ B E C O M E [ S L E E P χ ] ] ] ] ] The transitive verb awake and its intransitive variant should, of course, be based on (roughly) the same lexical item. (32a) and (32b) can in fact be collapsed into one entry as shown in (33), where heavy parentheses include optional parts, the subscripts indicating that they must simultaneously be present or absent: (33) / awake / [ +V ] λχ (α λγ) λε [ e : ( Α [ [ A C T y ] [ C A U S E ) [ B E C O M E - . [ S L E E P χ ] ] ] ] ] Thus, according to (33), if an agent is present, it is realized as the grammatical subject, otherwise the argument of SLEEP becomes the subject. In German, the items integrated in (33) require separate entries shown in (34c) and (34d), which cannot be collapsed, even though they are etymologically related. German furthermore provides a lexical entry denot- ing the inverse event of (33), as shown in (34b).22 (34) a. / schlaf- / [ +V ] λχ λε [ε: [ S L E E P Χ ] ] b. / ein + schlaf- / [ +V ] λχ λε [ε: [ BECOME [ SLEEP χ ]]] c. / auf + wach- / [ +V ] λχ λε [e: [ B E C O M E - , [ S L E E P χ ] ] ] d. / (auf+) weck- / [ +V ] λχ Xy λβ [e: [ [ ACT y] [ CAUSE [ BECOME -, [ SLEEP x]]]]] It might be added, that 8rgative verbs like (33) are represented in German by cases like brechen(break), heilen(hea), schmelzen(melt) and others. However, the dominating pattern relating inchoative and causativc constructions of the same verb in German is reflexiviza- tion of the type (sich) öffnen (open), (sich) drehen (turn), (sich) biegen (bend), (sich) ändern (change) etc. (Cf. sie ändern den Fahrplan vs. der Fahrplan ändert sich in (8) and (9) above). A lexical entry of ändern (change) that would account for this aspect is sketched in (35), where heavy parentheses again indicate optionality:23 (i) Paul woke me up (ii) A sudden noise woke me up As shown by (ii), however, the subject position of a causative verb can also be assigned to an expression referring to an event rather than the relevant actor. Now, mutual substitution of actor and event is a rather general phenomenon. It therefore needs a systematic account, which cannot be pursued here any further. 22 The differences between (33) and (34) are in fact typical phenomena of lexicalization, exploiting general principles of lexical representation in idiosyncratic ways. This includes the incidental "overload" by the almost synonymous entries awake and wake up. A similar overload appears in German with aufwachen and erwachen being largely synonymous. It is worth noting on this back- ground that the lack of a straight causative counterpart for einschlafen (fall asleep) is not a mere idiosyncrasy: the verb einschläfern (lull asleep), which would fill this position morphologically, has the highly specialized interpretation of narcotize, obviously due to the fact that falling asleep is internally triggered and cannot directly be caused by an external agent. 23 As a side-remark it might be mentioned that the predicate DIFFERENT is an abbreviation, to be defined provisionally as follows, where { ρ } indicates that ρ is presupposed, as discussed below:
- 36. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 25 (35) / änder- / [ +V ] λχ λγ λε [ e : [ ([ ACT y] [ CAUSE )[ BECOME [ DIFFERENT χ ] ] ] ] ] In contrast to ergative verbs like (33), de-causativization is simpler in (35): No position from the argument structure is deleted, optionality applies only to the causative component in SF, leaving a spurious position Xy, as a consequence of which the object position is real- ized by a reflexive pronoun.24 Thus although the reflexive construction looks superficially more complex than the un-ergative use of a causative verb, the lexical information it re- quires is surprisingly simple. Turning now to the event structure based on lexical items with the internal make up il- lustrated in (32) - (35), we notice first that inchoative verbs referring to an event e, involve at least three eventualities: a source state Sj and a target state sk, such that the event e, is to be defined as the transition from Sj to sk. Thus for einschlafen, Sj and sk are the states of being awake and being asleep, respectively. Generally, the properties of the source state are defined by those of the target state simply by negation. Hence if c, is just the transition from Sj to sk, the information needed for the SF of an inchoative verb is only the specification of BECOME and the proposition ρ specifying the target state.25 Second, causative verbs referring to an eventuality en involve at least a cause em and an effect ei, such that en consists in the causation of ei by em. The effect ei might be a process, as in the truck moved the trailer steadily, or a state as in the squad kept the rope straight, but in the majority of cases it is an event, as in Max opened the bottle, Eve woke the kids up, Macy's changed the schedule, etc. In case of an event causation, the event's source and target state are to be distinguished. Hence causation of an event involves (at least) five eventualities: (36) a. the causing event em b. the effect ei, identified as the change e, c. the causation en of ei by the cause em d. the source state Sj of e; e. the target state sk of e; (i) [DIFFERENTX] =def 5 (P, s) [ { SI [ P x ] } -, [ Ρ X ] ] In other words, for something to be different with respect to some property P, a state meeting this condition is presupposed. It is only this presupposed condition with respect to which a difference can be identified in the first place. 24 This analysis implies (i) specific assumptions about improper positions in AS, i.e. operators that do not bind a variable in SF, and (ii) a natural, but non-trivial assumption about reflexive anaphors, according to which the antecedent of a reflexive pronoun provides the value for its argument posi- tion. See Bierwisch (1997) for some discussion of both assumptions. 25 For inchoatives like close, open, wake up, redden, etc. this fact manifests itself even in their mor- phological make-up. But also inchoatives like come and receive, where the target state is not marked morphologically, derive the initial from the final state by negation. There are, however, at least two types of lexical amendments that can be added to this basic pattern. First, for very few cases the source state may impose additional conditions. A case in point is melt, which requires its theme to start out as solid, rather than merely not liquid. Second, in cases like ersticken (choke), ertrinken (drown), erfrieren (freeze to death), all with the target state not alive, the transition is to be qualified by the mode of dying. Again the morphological make-up is relevant in many cases, an issue that must be left aside here.
- 37. 26 Manfred Bierwisch Corresponding to the target state, by which inchoatives are determined, the effect of the causation tends to be characteristic for causatives. This is in fact the essence of the pattern illustrated in (33), which captures the crucial property of so-called ergative verbs. It fur- thermore turns in many cases the resulting state into the defining condition of the causation as a whole. Obvious examples are the causative variants of open, close, wake up, dry, clean or German schwärzen (blacken), kühlen (cool), töten (kill) etc.26 Differing from the source state of inchoatives, the cause of causatives can be and often is lexically specified: erschla- gen (slay) erstechen (stab (to death)), erschießen (shoot), erdolchen (stab (with a dagger)) differ from töten (kill) by specifying the action, left open in kill. As already mentioned, ACT in (33) is a kind of dummy, in causatives like stab, shoot, or hang it is replaced by a lexical specification of the pertinent action.27 Besides these differences in lexical specification, the eventualities listed in (36) differ with respect to their temporal structure, their logical status, and their referential accessibil- ity, as shown in sections 6 and 7. 6. The eventualities involved in BECOME Taking BECOME as the core component of inchoatives, I will characterize its basic temporal structure by means of conditions proposed e.g. in Dowty (1979), taking BECOME as an op- erator of type (t, t) with the properties indicated in (37), where ρ specifies the target-state, and I, J, Κ are time intervals as schematized in (38): (37) [ BECOME ρ ] is true at I if and only if (i) there is an interval J containing the initial bound of I such that —.p is true at J, and (ii) there is an interval Κ containing the final bound of I such that ρ is true at K. (38) J Κ 1 [' 1 " : > I Two problems must be clarified here. First, as it stands, the interval I can extend over arbi- trary parts of the source as well as the target state, such that Fred woke up would hold for a situation that includes arbitrary parts of Fred's sleep and of his being awake. Second, if one relies on strictly two-valued logic, no interval I' between J and Κ is possible, as at any time 26 Again, the defining target state may, but need not be morphologically realized. Thus while German töten is related to tot (dead), the resulting state has no overt reflex in kill. Similarly give, show, or convince are characterized by the resulting state, viz. have, see, and believe, respectively, without morphological relationship. 27 The basic causative pattern can be enriched by further conditions, as in assassinate, murder, do- nate, etc. Amendments of this sort don't change the event reference and can thus be ignored here.
- 38. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 27 either ρ or —.p must hold, with no transition. Hence any change would have to be strictly momentary. Dowty suggests to avoid these problems first by means of some sort of Gricean maxim, which picks out the shortest non-empty interval appropriate under conditions of encyclopedic or common sense knowledge, and second by acknowledging intervening time-intervals with undecided (or not two-valued) truth conditions. This ambivalent time structure of the event ej, which overlaps with both Sj and sk, is reflected by the fact that normally ej is not available for durational adverbials, as shown in (39a), but might still be qualified for extension in time in (39b): (39) a. * The cat died for three hours, b. The cat died very slowly. The next point to be noted is the different status to be assigned to the event, its initial and its final state. According to standard criteria, they instantiate what is usually called asser- tion, presupposition and implication, respectively. Consider (40) for illustration: (40) a. The cat died. b. The cat didn't die. c. Did the cat die? d. Didn't the cat die? Asserting and denying the cat's dying equally requires the initial state of the event, viz. the cat's being alive, to hold before. It must also hold for both types of question (40c) and (40d) to be appropriate. The negation of the initial state, i.e. the cat's being dead before the event, is compatible with the negation (40b) only as a correction of the presupposition. The target state on the other hand, viz. the cat being dead afterwards, follows from the truth of the assertion (40a), while its negation, that the cat is still alive, follows from the denial (40b). These observations are expressed more formally in (41) for the target state and in (42) for the source state, where t o t ' represents (temporal) overlap of t and t', and { φ } ψ indicates that φ is presupposed by ψ :28 (41) Ve [ 5s' [ e: [ BECOME ρ ] implies s': [ ρ ] ] ] where Τ e = t, Τ s' = t', t' ο t , t' ο t", t < t" . (42) Ve [ 3s [ e : [ BECOME [ ρ ] ] ] => [ { s: ρ ] } [ e : [ BECOME [ ρ ] ] ] ] ] where Τ s z>c Τ e (i.e. s precedes e immediately) (41) requires the target state s' to share its time in part with e and in part with the subse- quent interval t". Because of (41), the source state s can overlap only with the initial part of the event e. One might construe (42) as an operation that expands the expression to the left of the arrow into that to the right of it, supplying automatically the presupposed source state 28 This notation is adopted from Kamp (2001), where properties of presuppositions are explored more generally.
- 39. 28 Manfred Bierwisch of an inchoative event. In any case, (41) and (42) spell out the properties of BECOME and the predictable aspects of inchoatives based on it. I will now turn to the intriguing question to what extent the eventualities involved in a change of state are accessible for reference and modification. The analysis proposed for wake up, einschlafen, or aufwachen (in (32b) and (34)) suggests that it is just the main event, which the referential position Xc makes available to this effect. This seems to be born out by cases like (43), where apparently tense, temporal and modal adverbials all apply to the main event: (43) Dann schlief sie innerhalb von drei Minuten ganz sanft ein. Then she fell asleep very softly within three minutes Similarly, adverbial quantification by frequently, usually, mostly, occasionally etc. as in (44a) must rely on the same variable, given that adverbial quantifiers range over events, as proposed e.g. by von Fintel (1994). Simplifying with respect to irrelevant details, (44a) is thus to be analyzed as (44b), where [ MOST e ] must be construed as a quantifier with the restrictor given by the SF of Eva schläft ein and the nucleus in zehn Minuten·. (44) a. Eva schläft meistens in zehn Minuten ein. Eva usually falls asleep within ten minutes b . MOST e [ e : [ BECOME [ SLEEP EVA ] ] ] [ Τ e c 1 0 MINUTES ] ] As noted right in the beginning, this is not the whole story, though. A crucial problem, already illustrated in (1) above, is shown by the minimal pair in (45): (45) a. Er ist in kurzer Zeit eingeschlafen. (He fell asleep within a moment) b. Er ist für kurze Zeit eingeschlafen. (He fell asleep for a moment) The temporal delimitation within a moment in (45a) characterizes the change, while the durational adverbial for a moment in (45b) can only concern its resulting state. In other words, different aspects of the complex eventuality must be available for modification. One way to account for this observation has been proposed by McCawley (1973) within the framework of Generative Semantics. According to this proposal, the system of pre- lexical syntax provides two syntactic positions for an adverbial in cases like (45): within a moment commands [ BECOME [ SLEEP χ ] ], whilefor a moment commands just the predica- tion [ SLEEP χ ].29 The pros and cons of pre-lexical syntax need not be repeated here, as the observation illustrated by (1) and (45) has various ramifications not naturally accounted for on the basis of pre-lexical syntax. Notice first, that the alternative interpretation illustrated in (45) carries over to adnominal modification, as shown by the parallel properties of the (a)- and (b)-cases in (46) and (47): 29 This approach has been pursued in a number of ways, especially with respect to elements like almost and again e.g. in von Stechow (1996). Alternative accounts of these facts, which do not rely on pre-lexical syntax, are discussed e.g. in Kamp & Roßdeutscher (1994).
- 40. The event structure of CA USE and BECOME 29 (46) a. Er kehrte nach kurzer Zeit/für kurze Zeit heim. He returned home after/for a short time b. Seine Heimkehr nach so kurzer Zeit/für so kurze Zeit His return home after/for such a short time (47) a. Das Wetter änderte sich plötzlich/dauerhaft. The weather changed suddenly/permanently b. Die plötzliche/dauerhafte Änderung des Wetters The sudden/permanent change of the weather The alternative furthermore persists under adverbial quantification as illustrated in (44). Thus, a generic sentence like (48a) clearly requires quantification and modification to apply to the event as a whole, while in (48b) only the temporally restricted sleeping period is quantified over: (48) a. Ein normaler Patient schläft meistens in ungefähr einer Stunde ein. An average patient usually falls asleep within roughly one hour b. Ein normaler Patient schläft meistens fur ungefähr eine Stunde ein. An average patient usually falls asleep for roughly one hour In principle, this type of interpretation again carries over from adverbial cases like (49) to the adnominal modification in (50), which might be considered as clumsy, but neither as ungrammatical nor unclear in interpretation: (49) a. Gelegentlich ändert sich das Wetter in wenigen Minuten. Occasionally the weather changes within a few minutes b. Gelegentlich ändert sich das Wetter fur mehrere Wochen. Occasionally the weather changes for several weeks (50) a. Gelegentliche Änderungen des Wetters in wenigen Minuten waren absehbar Occasional changes of the weather for within a few minutes were to be expected b. Gelegentliche Änderungen des Wetters für mehrere Wochen waren absehbar Occasional changes of the weather for several weeks were to be expected With respect to the background assumptions sketched in section 2, the question arises whether and how the state s', instantiating according to (41) the result of the change, should be available for reference and modification in the same way as the event e. Formally, two options can be adumbrated, if we assume that both the event e and its target state s' are actually available in SF for abstraction by argument positions, an assumption that requires the SF of an inchoative verb like einschlafen as illustrated in (34b) to be modified as shown in (51), with the obvious modification in (41) and (42). The two options to be considered can then be illustrated by (52). (51) [ e :[ BECOME [s': [SLEEP χ ] ] ] ]
- 41. 30 Manfred Bierwisch (52) a. / ein + schlaf- / [ +V ] λχ Xs' Xe [ e : [ BECOME [ s': [ SLEEP χ ] ] ] ] b. / ein + schlaf- / [ +V ] λχ X(e,s') [ e : [ BECOME [ s': [ SLEEP χ ] ] ] ] Both of these possibilities raise non-trivial problems. In (52a) an additional, presumably optional, in any case rather specific position would have to be introduced into AS requiring various conditions determining its properties and behavior. Even if s-selection would guar- antee that only an appropriate adverbial can get its argument position absorbed by either Xs' or Xe, there are still a fair number of unsolved problems raised by the additional, improper referential position. These problems would not arise in (52b), where no additional position is introduced, but merely λε, the regular event reference, is replaced by the position supporting the complex variable (e,s') instead of the original e. This would require, how- ever, an intricate and completely ad hoc regime of lambda abstraction, dealing with com- plex variables and their effects. Hence instead of exploring artificial ways to adapt one of the solutions hinted at in (52), it seems reasonable to stick to already available means as far as possible, getting along without an additional eventuality-variable squeezed into AS. Two observations seem to be relevant in this respect. First, adverbials that are neutral with respect to event or state apply by default to the overall event. Thus even though the time, the companionship, and the localization of Peter's change of place could just as well characterize the target state, it is interpreted as a specification of the event: (53) a. Peter kam gestern abend. Peter came last night b. Peter kam unerwartet nach Hause. Peter came home unexpectedly Even though (53a) would be compatible with the truth of Peter was here last night, it clearly does not semantically represent that proposition. Corresponding comments apply to (53b). Second, tense and time adverbials seem to be forced to apply to the same eventuality. Thus, the durational modification in (54a) concerns the target state, which the past tense locates before the utterance time, while the manner adverbial in (54b) modifies the change, which the present tense locates (preferably) at utterance time. (54) a. Das Tor öffnete sich fur fünf Minuten. The door opened for five minutes b. Das Tor öffnet sich langsam. The door opened slowly These observations suggest that there is only one event reference available, which must support both the change or - under appropriate conditions - its result. This would be the natural effect if inchoative verbs with the operator BECOME have the representation illus- trated in (55) for sich öffnen (intransitive open): (55) / öffn- / [ +V, -N ] XxXyXe [ e : [ BECOME [ OPEN χ ] ] ]
- 42. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 31 The crucial point here is the status of BECOME marked by italicization.30 What this is in- tended to indicate is a special type of optionality, in the sense that it can be ignored for conceptual and truth-conditional interpretation, such that (54a) would have more or less the interpretation of (56a) with the SF as indicated in (56b): (56) a. Das Tor war fur fünf Minuten offen. The door was open for five minutes b . 3 e [ T e < T u [ e : [ O P E N [ D E F χ [ D O O R Χ ] ] ] & [ T e D 5 M I N U T E S ] ] ] There is, however, a crucial difference in interpretation between (54a) and (56a): While (54a) explicitly claims the resulting state to be the effect of a change, (56b) simply states a past situation.31 This difference would be an automatic effect of the condition (42), if we assume that the presupposed source state is introduced also if the "shadowy" operator does not participate in further interpretation, in other words, if (55) is expanded into (57) in any case,32 while (42) would of course not apply in (56): (57) / öffn- / [ +V, -Ν ] λχ λy λε [{ s z>c e & s: -.[ OPEN χ ] } [e: [ BECOME [ OPEN χ ]]]] Notice that the presupposed state s immediately precedes e, whether e instantiates an event or a state. This fairly restricted stipulation associated with the status of BECOME yields ex- actly the two options for reference to eventualities illustrated before. It furthermore carries over to nouns as exemplified in (50). Thus Änderung (change) would have an entry like (58), which refers either to the change or its result, triggering again by means of (42) the presupposed source state:33 ( 5 8 ) / änder-ung / [ +N ] (λχ) λβ [ e : [ BECOME [ D I F F E R E N T χ ] ] ] On this background, it is interesting to note that reference and modification may oscillate between the event (as a whole) and its target state, but not between the event and its pre- supposed source state. Even adverbials that would conceptually fit the source state can only 30 For the improper argument position λy giving rise to the reflexive anaphor, see note 23 31 There are, of course, implicatures arising from the delimitation for five minutes, but that is a differ- ent issue which I'll leave aside here. 32 For the sake of completeness, it might be noted that the implication required by (41) holds trivi- ally, even if BECOME is ignored. 33 As Änderung is a regular derivation, it presumably does not require a separate lexical entry. (58) furthermore leaves aside the relation to the causative variant of ändern (included in (35) above), which would show up in cases like seine überraschende Änderung der Liste (his changing the list surprisingly). - It should be noted, though, that applying (42) to (58) to introduce the presupposed state would give (ii), if the definition (i) for DIFFERENT given in fn. 22 is taken into account: (i) [ DIFFERENT χ ] = d c f 3 ( P , s) [ { s : [ Ρ χ ] } - . [ Ρ χ ] ] (ii) / änder-ung / [ +N ] (λχ) X e [ { s z > c e & s : [ P x ] } [ e : BECOME -, [ Ρ χ ] ] ] ] This correctly specifies the (result of the) change as cancellation of some property Ρ that held of χ before.
- 43. 32 Manfred Bierwisch modify the event - as in (59a) - or the target state - as in (59b). Adverbials that would be appropriate only for the source state, as in (59c), are anomalous. (59) a. Er ist qualvoll gestorben. He died painfully b. Er ist eine halbe Stunde weggegangen. He left half an hour c. ?? Er hat sich seit zwei Stunden hingesetzt. He sat down since two hours In cases like (60a) the adverbial clearly specifies the duration before the event to which the clause refers. Hence the time interval of the event differs from that specified by the adver- bial, exactly as cases like (60b). Thus, the adverbial in (60a) and (60b) does not rely on reference to the target state. (60) a. Er ist nach einer Stunde aufgestanden. He got up after an hour b. Er ist vor einer Stunde aufgestanden. He got up an hour ago In general, then, an inchoative verb (or noun, for that matter) refers to one and only one eventuality. This is primarily the event it describes, and secondarily - due to the peculiar, elusive status of BECOME - the target state, but never the source state. Although presup- posed and necessary, the source state is not available for reference in SF. The particular, somehow diaphanous character of BECOME may also be supported from the opposite direc- tion, so to speak. One of the criteria for the standard distinction between (a-telic) processes and states on the one hand and (telic) events on the other is their behavior with respect to durational and terminating adverbials. As discussed so far, proper events like come, die, get sick combine freely with temporal delimitations like (with)in a week, but allow durational adverbials only as a specification of the resulting state, such that die for a week is awkward: (61) a. Hans schlief innerhalb einer Stunde ein. Hans fell asleep within one hour b. Hans schlief für eine Stunde ein. Hans fell asleep for one hour c. Anna starb innerhalb einer Woche. Anna died within one week d. ?? Anna starb für eine Woche ?? Anna died for one week States and homogeneous processes on the other hand allow durational adverbials, but should resist temporal delimitations, such that be sick within three days would be out. That this is not the case is shown by the acceptability of (62a) and (62c). This does not mean, however, that states and homogeneous processes combine with time-limits, but rather that
- 44. The event structure of CA USE and BECOME 33 states are provided with an initial limitation by what has been called ingressive re- interpretation.34 (62) a. Hans schlief innerhalb einer Stunde. Hans slept within an hour b. Hans schlief eine Stunde lang. Hans slept for an hour c. Anna war innerhalb einer Woche krank. Anna was ill within one week d. Anna war eine Woche krank. Anna was ill for one week Technically, the re-interpretation that provides the required (initial) limitation of the state or process might be considered as introducing the operator BECOME, such that e.g. the SF of schlafen given in (34a) is turned into that of einschlafen in (34b). Similarly, the SF of the copula sein (be) is converted into the SF of the inchoative copula werden (become, get) in (62c). In other words, ingressive reinterpretation of states relies in a way on the improper presence of BECOME, just as the durativization of events is due to its improper absence. Thus the adaptation illustrated in (61) comes out as the inverse to that in (62), both based on the same operator that can be invoked or dropped on demand. These considerations raise the question of whether the optional state reference associated with BECOME is not to be construed as a special case of the more general phenomenon called conceptual shift in Bierwisch (1982) and coercion in Pustejovsky (1995). By concep- tual shift, the semantic interpretation of lexical items is adapted to contextual conditions that would otherwise violate conditions of s-selection.35 Under this perspective, the state reference of inchoatives as e.g. in (61b) is the effect of conceptual shift, just like the ingres- sive interpretation of duratives in (62a).36 If this is correct, the particular status of BECOME 34 A survey of the extensive discussion about states, processes, events and several types of re- interpretation is given e.g. in Maienborn (2003, chapter 3). 35 For the sake of illustration, consider institute, which refers to a particular social organization in (i), its building(s) in (ii), its personnel in (iii), and something like its general principle in (iv): (i) The institute appointed a new director. (ii) The institute has a new entrance. (iii) The whole institute went on a long prepared excursion. (iv) An institute is usually shaped by its head. In each of these cases, the subject DP refers to a different sort of entities. The variation is, of course, not arbitrary. It can only select from an organized range of options. It must be emphasized, however, that in spite of systematic restrictions things are more complex than these hints might seem to suggest. 36 Another well known type of adaptation is the wide-spread iterative or habitual interpretation, illustrated in (i) and (ii): (i) Martin ist den ganzen Tag rein- und rausgegangen. Martin went in and out all day long (ii) Maria ist jahrelang mit dem Rad nach Hause gefahren. For years, Maria went home by bike
- 45. 34 Manfred Bierwisch would merely indicate a systematic possibility for adaptation under contextual conditions. Under this assumption, (63a) would differ from (63b) merely by the presence of BECOME, which (63b) lacks: (63) a. Auguste wurde drei Tage krank. Auguste became ill for three days b. Auguste war drei Tage krank. Auguste was ill for three days This might correspond to a subtle semantic difference, due to the presupposed source state invoked by BECOME in (63a), but not in (63b). A final problem to be taken up concerns the claim that the argument structure of a verb provides one and only one event position related to BECOME. The problem originates with examples like (64), where both the event and its result seem to be modified, requiring two separate positions in AS: (64) a. Er ist gestern zehn Minuten in mein Büro gekommen. Yesterday, he came in my office for ten minutes b. Später wird sich ganz langsam für eine halbe Stunde der Vorhang öffnen. Later on, very slowly the curtain will open for half an hour Things are fairly uncomplicated in (64a), where the time adverbial yesterday can naturally apply to the state modified by (for) ten minutes. After all, (64a) is almost synonymous with Er war gestern zehn Minuten in meinem Büro. (64b) is more complicated, as very slowly cannot modify the target state, while the event cannot properly be modified by the duration for half an hour. It seems, however, that for half an hour in (64b) does in fact specify the underlying plan of the event, rather than the duration of the result.37 If this is correct, then in both (64a) and (64b) only one eventuality is referred to, viz. the target state in (64a), and the planned event in (64b). This sort of interpretation applies also to cases like (65), where the duration of the target state would be at variance with the time interval between past and present tense - unlessfor three hours is the destination or intention assigned to the event of leaving.38 A particular type of iteration, creating a homogeneous process, is involved in cases like (iii): (iii) Er wird langsam größer (und größer). He is slowly getting taller (and taller) 37 This gets more obvious if (64b) is contrasted with (i), where the durational adverbial cannot natu- rally be construed as indicating an intended period, such that the combination becomes deviant: (i) 77 Später wird sich ganz langsam eine halbe Stunde lang der Vorhang öffnen. 38 To the extent to which this sort of reconciliation is blocked or unnatural, the combination of two adverbials becomes deviant: (i) 77 Das Wetter änderte sich plötzlich für eine Woche. 77 Suddenly, the weather changed for a week I owe this observation to an anonymous reviewer.
- 46. The event structure of CA USE and BECOME 35 (65) Paul left for three hours. Two hours are already over. It might be noted in conclusion that the issues of event and state reference of BECOME must not be confused with the intriguing problem of complex temporal frames and other condi- tions, as shown in (66): (66) Vor zwei Jahren in Paris bin ich drei Wochen lang jeden Tag zwei Stunden ins Mu- seum gegangen. Two years ago in Paris, I went for three weeks every day two hours to the museum How the event reference of inchoatives (and other expressions) is taken up by complex frames of this sort is a problem of its own. 7. The event structure o f CAUSE As noted above, CAUSE is a functor relating two propositions, specifying a cause and its effect, respectively. For the sake of illustration, consider the entry (35), collapsing the causative and inchoative reading of ändern (change), repeated here as (67): (67) / änder- / [ +V ] λχ λy λβ [ e : [ ( [ ACT y] [ CAUSE )[ BECOME [ DIFFERENT Χ ] ] ] ] ] The cause is specified by [ ACT y ], the effect is specified by [ BECOME [ DIFFERENT Χ ] ], which determines either a change or - under appropriate conditions - its result. As borne out by (68a) and (68b), this option carries over from inchoatives to causatives: (68) a. Sie haben den Plan gestern geändert. They changed the schedule yesterday b. Sie haben den Plan fur fünf Tage geändert. They changed the schedule for five days Before looking into the event structure of CAUSE more closely, I will sketch its truth- conditional properties. A widely accepted view on this matter has been proposed in Dowty (1979). The proposal is based on the notion of causal factor: φ is a causal factor for ψ if φ necessarily implies ψ and ψ would not hold without φ. With this proviso, the following truth-condition for CAUSE can be formulated:39 39 Actually, Dowty provides a more sophisticated characterization of "causal factor", based on the notion of causal dependence of ψ on φ, and φ is a causal factor for ψ, if and only if a sequence of causal dependencies connects φ with ψ. Similarly, the intuitive notion of a more remote causal factor has a more technical characterization in Dowty's original definition: (i) [φ CAUSE ψ ] is true if and only if (i) φ is a causal factor for ψ, and (ii) for all other φ', such that φ' is also a causal factor for ψ, some -^φ-world is as similar or more similar to the actual world than any other —ιφ'-world is.
- 47. 36 Manfred Bierwisch (69) [φ CAUSE ψ ] is true if and only if (i) φ is a causal factor for ψ, and (ii) any other causal factor φ' for ψ is more remote than φ. Concerning the event structure related to CAUSE, the properties and dependencies of three eventualities are at issue (cf. (36) above):40 (70) a. the cause em, characterized by φ b. the effect β|, characterized by ψ c. the causation en, specified as [φ CAUSE ψ ] As shown in (68), the effect of the causation can be an event or a state, an alternative that need not be due to the particular status of BECOME in the effect-proposition. Thus (71a) is naturally interpreted as the causation of an event, (71b) is the causation of a process, and (71c) indicates the causation of a state: (71) a. The truck broke the fence rapidly b. The truck moved the cart quite a while very slowly c. The students held the rope straight for at least two hours. What might be less obvious is the observation that the structure of the effect determines conceptually the homogeneous or non-homogeneous nature of the causation. To put it dif- ferently: The causation of an event is an event, while the causation of a state or process is a state or process. This might appear paradoxical at first glance, as one would expect the effect to be determined by the cause, rather the other way round. But notice that here we talk about the interdependence of causation and the effect it gives rise to, rather than the dependence of the effect on its cause. According to this consideration, it would be a natural conclusion that the causation as a whole and its effect are open for the same range of modi- fiers. As cases like (71) indicate, the modification is just not specialized in this respect. This would be a natural consequence of the assumption that the causation en and the effect ei are not available for separate event reference. Notice that this accounts automatically for cases like (68), where the event- or state-interpretation of BECOME in ändern carries over from the effect to the causation. So far, the assumption that BECOME should not overtly provide multiple event-reference seems to carry over to CAUSE: causation and effect are not accessed by separate event- variables.41 What must be clarified, however, is the status of the cause em. That cause and For the present concerns, the intuitive notion that the cause of an eventuality can be specified as the closest possible causal factor will be sufficient. 40 It should be noted that this is fully in line with Dowty's definition, as he explicitly considers cau- sation as a relation between eventualities, specified by the propositions they instantiate. 41 This applies not only to the temporal structure of the eventualities involved but also to other as- pects, for reasons to which we will return shortly. Roughly speaking, the causation en does not ex- hibit a modality independently from the cause em.
- 48. The event structure of CAUSE and BECOME 37 effect of a causative verb cannot be temporally distant has already been noted by Fodor (1970). As he observes, (72b) is not an acceptable paraphrase of (72a).42 (72) a. Floyd heated the glass on Saturday such that it melted on Sunday b. Floyd melted the glass on Sunday by heating it on Saturday Notice that the truth conditions for CAUSE given in (69) do not restrict the temporal relation between cause and effect.43 Their coherence within one eventuality comes out as a natural consequence, however, if we assume that the constituent eventualities do not allow for reference by separate event variables. Strictly speaking, this assumption would require one temporal structure for the causation as a whole. Hence not only the nature of the causation and the effect are interdependent, as already noted, but also that of the causal event and - via causation - the effect. In other words, events can only cause events, and processes or states can be causal only for processes or states. This assumption is not as implausible as it might appear in view of the fact that e.g. Floyd broke the glass describes a causal event the effect of which is the state of the broken glass. The effect of Floyd's action, however, is the event described as the glass broke, the target state of which is naturally construed as the result of Floyd's action. Conversely, if the effect cannot be a change, but must be a bare state or process, then ac- cording to this assumption the cause must be a process or state as well. This seems to be borne out by examples like (71b) and (71c): The action of the truck in (71b) must be as continuous a process as the motion of the cart it continuously causes. Similarly for the stu- dents causing the rope to be straight in (71c). The claim that only the overall eventuality is available for reference or modification in entries with CAUSE (and BECOME) raises a number of problems, the first of which is illus- trated in (73). In cases like these, the adverbial apparently modifies just the causal act. Brute force in (73a) and despair in (73b) are neither properties of the effect nor of the causal connection as such. Similarly the slowness in (73c) and the recklessness in (73d) are neither properties of the result nor the causal connection: (73) a. Floyd broke the glass with brute force b. Elvira closed the shop in despair c. He sharpened the pencil slowly d. The enemy's reckless destruction of most of the city 42 Fodor's argument is directed against pre-lexical syntax, according to which transitive melt would have the same underlying structure as cause to melt. Thus Fodor's point is that this assumption must be refuted, since (72b) is deviant, while (i) with the putatively synonymous cause to melt is acceptable, providing the basis for an overt separation of cause and effect: (i) Floyd caused the glass to melt on Sunday by heating it on Saturday. 43 As a matter of fact, Dowty does not exclude a time course that has the effect preceding the cause, a possibility assumed in certain theories of modem physics. It might be added that Dowty's causal factor explicitly relies on a sequence of causally dependent events, such that "direct causation" be- comes the borderline case.
- 49. 38 Manfred Bierwisch It would, however, be an artificial abstraction to separate the causing activity from its causal connection. Especially the notion of an activity modified independently from its causal role would not correspond to the conceptual structure imposed on the situation. The despair, for instance, attested in (73b) qualifies Elvira's behavior with regard to the ex- pected or intended effect, rather than her pure performance. Similarly, the brute force in- volved in (73a) becomes relevant with respect to the causal connection, not the physical act as such. Similarly, what is slow in (73c)44 or reckless in (73d) can only be determined with respect to the effect. Considerations of this sort, which apply, by the way, to nouns as well as verbs, hold in particular for modifiers of intentionality, as in (74), where the causal activ- ity is qualified as incidental or intentional just with respect to its causal aspect: (74) a. Mary turned the page inadvertently b. Frank's considerate separation of the different cases A somewhat different problem arises with respect to the effect-proposition of a causal even- tuality. As already noted with respect to (68b), the durative adverbial for five days concerns the situation of the changed schedule, indicating that the effect of the causal eventuality is a state, rather than an event. Otherwise the durative adverbial would be inappropriate. In fact, cases like (68) and (71) were meant to show that the adverbial determines at the same time the structure of the causation and its effect. This observation can only be correct, however, if the characteristics represented by the modifier carry over from the effect to the causal eventuality. This looks plausible with respect to the fence-breaking truck or the rope- holding students in (71). But how could the activity of changing the schedule in (68) be either punctual or durative, depending on the different types of effect? The answer to this puzzle is that the activity is conceptualized differently: Changing the schedule for a certain period imposes a causal condition for the relevant time - just as holding a rope creates a causal condition for a certain period. In other words, to be the source of a condition that holds for a certain time span differs from an otherwise identical situation without this con- dition, just as a certain activity with a certain intention - say cleaning the table - differs from the same physical movements executed without this goal. Under this perspective, the adverbials in (68) apply naturally to the eventuality as a whole, due to the particular charac- ter they impose on the effect. These considerations seem to be supported by the fact that adverbials can hardly specify the effect without automatically involving the eventuality as a whole. Even though the adverbial rasch und eindeutig in (75a) is a genuine qualification of the effected change, it cannot avoid to include the causal connection from which it results. Similarly the causal power of the fire is as partial as its effect in (75b), and even the kids' getting frightened in (75c) is hardly separable from Peter's acting furiously in some way. (75) a. Die Untersuchung klärte die Situation rasch und eindeutig. The inquiry clarified the situation quickly and unequivocally 44 What counts is obviously not the activity as such - which might depend on the knife or whatever device is used - but the time needed to achieve the result in question. Example (73c) is due to an anonymous reviewer.
- 50. Other documents randomly have different content
- 51. O medico concentrou-se um instante e depois começou pausadamente, como quem faz um relatorio, sob os olhares ansiosos do rapaz. —«Quando cheguei de Lisboa, chamado por um telegramma do Emygdio, fui directamente a tua casa. A Candida sahiu do quarto aos gritos, apavorada, como louca. Eu nem reparei que teu pae desvairado se debatia nos braços dos criados que lhe não deixavam despedaçar a cabeça pelas paredes, e que tua mãe cahira como fulminada com os sentidos perdidos. Não vi nada! Corri ao quarto na vaga e disparatada esperança de a salvar ainda... —«E a desditosa criança estava já morta?!... —«Ouve. A Pillar fallecêra n’esse instante; ainda não estava completamente fria. O Vilhegas, junto d’ella, parecia idiotisado pelo soffrimento... —«Ou pelo remorso?!... —«Não sei; já te disse que não avento opiniões, conto-te o que vi. Tentava fechar-lhe os olhos, n’uma preoccupação de doido, que me impressionou bastante... —«D’ahi para deante já eu sei, nem tão poucas vezes m’o tem contado a pobre Engracia. Foi ella quem vestiu a morta; nem quiz ninguem para a ajudar, que a sua menina só a ella a queria... O João escondeu a cabeça nos braços cruzados sobre a meza, n’um soluçar de angustia. —«Então que tolice é essa, João?!...—ralhou amigavelmente o Ramalho. —«Tem razão, isto não é proprio d’um homem... Continúe, mas deixe-me antes agradecer-lhe os cuidados e carinhos que n’essa occasião dispensou aos meus pobres paes. —«Não falles n’isso, deixa-me continuar. Quando vi que não havia alli nada a fazer, corri para junto dos que mais soffriam. Nunca vi uma dôr egual, e tenho assistido a bastantes!... Cheguei a pensar
- 52. em mandar-te chamar, mas, perdôa se pensei mal, vi-os tão sentidos com o desgosto que julguei perigoso todo e qualquer abalo. Ver repentinamente o filho que ficava quando a outra lhe fugia para sempre, era exacerbar a dôr. A Natureza tem em si mesma o unico calmante para as grandes maguas, o tempo. A vida, meu caro, tem- me ensinado estas coisas. Quando o soffrimento é sincero, a propria distracção o irrita e faz maior. —«Ah, mas o que eu soffri sósinho quando o soube! O que eu curti só, longe dos meus, sem um amigo que bastante o fosse para soffrer commigo!... Sem uma pessôa que ao menos me lamentasse na linguagem que o meu coração melhor podia entender n’uma situação d’aquellas, a minha! Ah meu amigo, que eu não sei como não enlouqueci!... —«Pois sim, lá soffrias o mesmo, ou talvez mais, mas não tinhas a brutalidade d’estas scenas mortuarias que forçam a dôr até á revolta. Elles cá ir-se-hiam habituando... que a resignação é habito, filho. —«Sim, convenço-me que fez bem, mas o que me tresvaría é a desconfiança de que elles a matassem! —«Mas com que fim? Não era o interesse do Emygdio casar com tua irmã? —«Seria o d’elle, mas não era o da Candida. —«Hum!...—rosnou o doutor estendendo os beiços incredulo.— Convences-te de que tua prima quizesse o Vilhegas emquanto te visse solteiro? —«O que podia ella esperar de mim, que nunca a cortejei? —«As mulheres, quando são bellas e ambiciosas como a Candida, não se prendem com essas frioleiras... —«Não sei, digo eu agora. O que sei é que a Engracia os surprehendeu por mais d’uma vez conversando em voz baixa pelos cantos.
- 53. —«Lá voltas com os ditos da Engracia... —«A Pillar aborreceu-os a ambos. Elle parece evitar-me, acanhado... A Candida ficou despeitada, parece, pela minha sahida para a Belgica sem lhe declarar amôr... Isto, meu amigo, são factos. Lá em casa não se pode fallar em tal, que para meus paes a Candida é um anjo. Eu é que desconfio muito d’aquella bondade sonsa. Desde pequena que me persegue, e, confesso, nunca mulher nenhuma me repugnou tanto como ella, sendo aliás bonita. —«Formosissima, dize, que não lhe fazes favor. —«Não acho, não a tolero. Ha n’aquella passividade, que quer fazer passar por bondade, uma tão grande vaidade e não sei o quê de falso que me irritou e affastou sempre. Levantou-se inquieto e começou a passear pelo escriptorio, murmurando palavras, como se estivesse só. De repente estacou em frente do medico: —«Só queria saber a verdade! Mas como?! Ah, que se elles se namoram, se casam!... Mato-os como cães damnados, percebe? —«Ora deixa-te d’isso, casam lá!... —«Juro-lhe que os matava por minhas mãos. É a unica prova que aguardo. Até já pensei em namorar a Candida para descobrir alguma coisa, mas quando lhe fallo... estou como a Engracia, parece que vejo a sombra da Pillar a prohibir-mo!... Se ella era tão pura, como poderia querer uma mentira?!... —«Não te sabia espiritista... —«Não sou, não era! Que eu já nem sei o que sou! Não posso com a ideia de que minha irmã não é mais do que uma pouca de materia que se transforma estupidamente, immundamente, na terra!...
- 54. VI Na botica velha, apezar do excessivo calor, iam-se já reunindo os frequentadores do costume. Mas não entravam, porque o pequeno recinto a que os remedios davam um cheiro enjoante era pouco convidativo, por uma noite assim quente, para tantos pulmões que reclamavam ar. Cada um que chegava ia dentro buscar cadeira, e, formando circulo, sentava-se fóra da porta, abanando-se com o chapéo n’um desabafo de asphixiados. Apezar d’isso, a palestra corria animada porque eram muitos os assumptos a discutir, e não ha temperatura, por mais alta que seja, que possa fazer morrer o microbio da má lingua. O Padre Mathias, de quinzena curta, escanhoado de fresco, e, por excepção, de collarinhos engommados e gravata limpa, dizia para o Braga: —«Você quer vir d’ahi jogar uma partida a casa do Maximiano? —«Eu não, homem; elle não faz nada do que se lhe pede... Veja lá se arranjou pôr em praça a casa do Barnabé, uma coisa que era mesmo uma justiça! —«Pois compre-a você ao Bernabé, que elle vendê-lha. —«Pois sim, mas que dinheirama elle não pedirá?! —«Você quer ter as coisas e não as quer pagar, é bôa!... Eu cá, se fosse rico, é que me ralava bem com taes miserias—em querendo uma coisa, comprava-a. —«Se fosse rico, se fosse rico!... É com o que lhe dão. O que tenho custou muito a ganhar ao meu pae e a mim tambem, não é para agora o esbaratar sem mais nem menos.
- 55. —«Não está mau ganho aquelle,—commentou o Neves ao ouvido do Domingos—se não fosse o roubo da casa do Olival queria ver o que elles tinham!... —«E o juro a cem por cento?...—respondeu o outro na mesma— quem lhe sabe da caronica!... —«Oh homem, não diga tal—continuava o cura. Se o Maximiano lhe não fizer ir a casa á praça, por expropriação, ninguem lho faz. —«O Visconde está agora de cima e com elle me entenderei. —«Você verá se o Visconde assigna essa trapalhada! Hade tratá lo com muito bons modos, mas não lho faz, tenha a certeza. —«Veremos! —«Pois veremos. —«Amanhã vou esperar o Visconde e se calhar fallo-lhe logo. —«Vae feliz. O Visconde tem escrupulos de mais para politico; se o Maximiano possuisse o dinheiro d’elle, com a cabeça que tem! Ainda o havemos de ver, quem sabe?!... Talvez presidente da republica! —«Pois elle está agora republicano?! —«Não, por emquanto não, mas se ella viesse!... E você não quer vir a casa do Maximiano, oh Neves?—terminou, desviando a conversa que lhe não agradava com o teimoso do Braga. —«Vou lá um bocadito. —«Então vamos, que são horas. Vendo o relogio de ferro oxidado —já nove! Irra, estas noites de verão são uns nicos! —«Eu tambem vou—disse o recebedor. —«E eu tambem—acudiu o Móttasinho escrevente do pae tabellião, imberbe, voz aflautada e ares importantes de janota provinciano.—Estou com curiosidade de ver como vem este anno a Hortensia—e puxou uma fumaça do cigarro, que ainda o engasgava.
- 56. —«Talvez imagine que ella fica apaixonada—casquinou ironico o escrivão de fazenda, secco e triste como um arenque fumado, apertando o estomago que a dyspepsia assaltava. —«Bem podia ser, sem ser milagre!... —«Aquella não é para o seu dente, Móttasinho—veio dizer do lado o cura, batendo lhe no hombro familiarmente. —«Não sei porque não, tem se visto coisas mais impossiveis; lá pela riqueza, tambem ella não tem muita—respondeu enrubecido como timido menino o pobre do Móttasinho. —«Rica não é, lá isso é verdade; mas a protecção do pae vale bem a fortuna aqui do sr. Braga. E olhe que é uma rapariga educada na alta—só falla em francez! —«Pois eu ainda conheci a avó a nem saber fallar portuguez. Uma gargalhada geral abafou o dito que o velho dr. Pinto atirou lá do seu grupo. O advogado, de barbas brancas e ondeantes, apezar de não ser ainda um velho, com os seus olhos negros e inquietos de pouco fiel e desconfiado, gosava todas as regalias de commentador ironico da vida provinciana. —«A pequena não tem nada com a ignorancia da avó—respingou azedo o Padre Mathias. —«Oh homem, não se escandalise, que isto é graça, não é fallar em desabono da sua gente—e sublinhava com uma gargalhada que lhe fazia tremer a barba sobre o peito, como n’um soluço. —«Fallem, fallem, que ainda os heide ver lá todos cahidos... Quando se convencerem que os homens ricos como o Visconde, que não faz da politica modo de vida, não são capazes de fazer um favor a um amigo!... —«Sim, o Maximiano para fazer favores á custa do estado é um barra! Mas ainda tem tanto parente pobre que primeiro que chegue aos estranhos ainda levará tempo—tornou, rindo sempre, o advogado.
- 57. —«Oh Neves, para onde vae você?—desviou o cura, na sua febre de movimento, vendo passar o professor. —«Vou fallar ao meu primo. Effectivamente dirigiu-se para o Vilhegas, que passava de largo, affectando não ver a gente da velha. O cura foi ter com elle, aproveitando o ensejo de deixar airosamente a roda. —«Então para onde vae, doutor? —«Um bocado até á botica nova conversar com o Telles. —«Está lá um calor de todos os diabos; porque não vem antes a casa do Maximiano? Olhe que se passa lá bem. —«Não tenho quasi nenhumas relações com elle. —«Não faz mal; vae commigo, é o bastante. —«Outro dia qualquer. —«Porque não hade ser hoje? Venha d’ahi. —«Hoje não, nem estou vestido... —«Deixe-se d’isso. Aquillo não tem as ceremonias da Viscondessa. Está-se á vontade. Venha d’ahi, ande!...—Vendo-o irresoluto, lá o foi arrastando até casa do conselheiro, seguido pelo Neves, o recebedor, o Móttasinho e mais uns poucos. —«Olha o Padre Cura a arrebanhar as rezes para o sacrificio— casquinou para o grupo o dr. Pinto. —«Aquillo sempre é um typo!...—resmungou o Braga. Em casa do Maximiano as portas e janellas abriam-se de par em par illuminando a rua da villa, pouco abundante de candieiros municipaes. As vozes que vinham de lá, o vulto do conselheiro que por momentos se debruçou na varanda atirando fóra a ponta do charuto meio acceso, a aproximação emfim d’essa gente que mal conhecia, fizeram recuar o Emygdio, que, no fundo, era um
- 58. acanhado. Mas o reverendo é que o não largou senão dentro da sala, pondo-o mesmo em frente do Maximiano. —«Sr. Conselheiro, este senhor não queria cá vir por não estar vestido convenientemente, e não o conhecer e não sei que mais... —«E o Padre Cura deu-lhe ordem de prisão?! Fez muitissimo bem. —«Oh, sr. Conselheiro, eu tinha o maior gosto em vir, mas, na verdade, para uma primeira visita, não venho em toilette competente. —«Oh, meu caro, nada de ceremonias. Esteja como em sua casa. Gosta de jogar? —«Não sei. Quasi não conheço as cartas. —«Então vamos a uma partida de bilhar, que o bilhar é como o vinho: aquece no inverno e refresca no verão. E, conversando animadamente, seguiram á sala de bilhar, d’onde vinham vozes alegres de gente moça. A filha do conselheiro, acompanhada por uma velha bonne e meia duzia de rapazes e raparigas, que a ouviam enlevados, fazia traquinada com as bolas, ria alto, rodava sobre os calcanhares, puxava o cinto bem abaixo para salientar a incrivel cintura, e papagueava em francez com a mademoiselle, voltando-se logo a vêr o effeito, para a roda embasbacada dos admiradores. Quando o pae lhe apresentou o Vilhegas, curvou a cabecinha frisada em pôpa e murmurou com a ponta dos beiços um cumprimento inintelligivel. Depois, simulando indifferença, foi para a janella arrastando os companheiros. De ahi a pouco a sua voz esganiçada sobresahia a todas as outras, e as rendas brancas que enfeitavam o vestido muito justo de piquet azul pallido andavam n’um rodopio. —«Quem é aquelle rapaz?—perguntou á Aurora Costa, uma vesga e morena, que abria em bico a blusa verde-couve. É
- 59. —«Aquelle? É o doutor novo, o medico que estava para casar com a Pillar de Mello. —«A pequena que morreu tysica?!... Ah, bem sei!... Agora a quem faz elle a côrte? —«Agora?! Então ainda o outro dia lhe morreu a noiva... —«E por isso não hade namorar mais? Ora adeus! Bem se vê que és da provincia. Quantos flirts tens tu? —«Não sei o que é... —«Flirt é como agora se chama ao namôro, que é uma palavra muito baixa. —«Eu?!... Nenhum. —«Nenhum?! Isso é uma vergonha, positivamente. —«Costumas ter mais do que um? —«Sempre és muito parva! Este inverno cheguei a ter vinte e cinco ao mesmo tempo—mas a gente chama-lhe flirtar. É plus distingué, e sabe ao mesmo. —«E se te chamam namoradeira? —«Ça m’est égal...—cantarolou, voltando-se a meio para o Móttasinho, que se curvava ceremonioso: —«Oh mr. Móttá, comment vous portez-vous? —«Ganhou. Agora, visto que não gosta de outro jogo—disse o Maximiano muito amavel para o Vilhegas, ao mesmo tempo que punha o taco sobre o bilhar—aqui o deixo entre a gente nova. Esteja á sua vontade, meu caro. Gosto que venham a minha casa, mas não posso ver ninguem contrafeito. Eu vou até lá dentro molhar a minha sôpa—terminou em ar de graça. Quando já ia a cruzar a porta, encontrou o juiz que se encostava gottoso a uma forte bengala de bambú, atarracado, grosseiro, de barba sal e pimenta, e dois olhinhos de porco incertos e máus. Trauteando sempre, brutal com os inferiores, mettendo-se a gracioso
- 60. com as senhoras, a quem dizia insolencias por amabilidades, queria dar-se uns ares de honrada isempção que muito faziam rir o dr. Pinto. —«Olá! Então hoje por aqui?—cumprimentou expansivo o conselheiro. —«Venho vê-lo. —«Ámanhã não pode decerto, seu maganão!... Já sei que vem o visconde. —«Não é por isso, é que ha dois dias que o não via... —«Então não vae á estação? —«Naturalmente não posso deixar d’ir. A viscondessa é d’uma amabilidade extrema para minha mulher; mal parece não ir, pelo menos eu, esperá-la. —«Sim, a viscondessa é muito amavel e o visconde tem tanta influencia no ministerio da justiça!... —«Eu não mendigo empenhos, senhor Conselheiro. Lá em cima conhecem bem a integridade do meu caracter e sabem que eu não me vendo por... —«Quem falla em tal, meu caro! Isto era brincadeira. Tambem eu sou amigo do visconde, apesar de adversario politico; lá por Lisboa não se levam as coisas a sério como cá na Parvonia. Muito a sério, ninguem conhece tão bem como eu a sua honestidade e desinteresse, por isso desejaria vê-lo collocar na vaga que se vae dar com a aposentação do Dr. Saavedra. —«Sério?! Elle aposenta-se? —«Mandaram me hoje dizer. —«Que logarzão!... Em Lisboa, e fazendo quanto quizer!... Pulso livre, claro—e a meia voz lá foram conversando até á sala d’entrada, onde, em volta d’uma grande meza, se reuniam os
- 61. jogadores de polis banque. Aos lados, em mezitas pequenas, estavam os caturras do voltarete, do whist, do boston ou do sólo. Mal o conselheiro appareceu, quasi todos os logares do polis se lhe offereceram amavelmente; logo elle, unctuoso, sempre risonho, com maciezas de voz e de phrase muito estudadas: —Oh, meus amigos, por quem são! Eu fico bem de pé, não se encommodem... mas, ante o protesto geral, foi sentar-se á direita do banqueiro, o Motta tabellião, um bilioso de cabello e bigode pintado e lunetas brilhantes á força de as limpar nas circumstancias graves. Sómente a face se lhe distendia em riso de satisfação quando, como agora, as notas, as moedas de prata e as marcas d’osso que substituiam o cobre, se lhe amontoavam diante dos olhos avaros. Vendo o Maximiano acceitar o logar da direita, estremeceu. Era uma honra, na verdade, mas tambem um perigo, porque ninguem como elle, acostumado ao grande jogo de Lisboa e Cascaes, para abafar uma banca logo á primeira. O baralho tremeu-lhe entre os dedos ao dar cartas ao visinho. Mas o conselheiro não jogou e um sorrisinho de alivio veio desfranzir-lhe os beiços e mostrar os dentes apodrecidos. Já fallava, já ria dos pontos que iam perdendo pequenas paradas, e pagava sem regatear ás senhoras. —«Jógo!—disse do outro lado da meza a mulher do Maximiano, que estendia sobre o panno verde as mãos cheias d’anneis de brilhantes. —«O sr. conselheiro não jóga no jogo da sr.ᵃ D. Maria Adelaide? perguntou o Motta, cortez. —«Eu tópo—insistiu ella seccamente—tire carta. O banqueiro mordeu os beiços despeitado e começou a puxar as cartas, vagaroso, muito molle, como se lhe estivessem colladas aos dedos. —«Perdi, quanto é?—disse atirando o seu jogo á meza e olhando com simulada indifferença para as mãos lampejantes que se
- 62. entretinha a revirar para mostrar o brilho dos anneis. —«São vinte e cinco mil réis, fóra estes miudos que não vale a pena contar. O tabellião fazia de generoso, não cabendo na pelle de regosijo. —«Conte tudo—ordenou orgulhosamente, para mostrar á pelintrice provinciana como se joga no grande mundo. A não ser o conselheiro, que conversava com a maior naturalidade para as outras mezas, todos os que estavam a meza do polis e os que de pé jogavam de fóra ou, meros mirones, simplesmente viam e commentavam, tinham seguido ansiosamente a partida arrojada da conselheira.—O Motta estava com uma sorte! Já não faltava senão dar mais uma vez; se passasse d’essa já não se desforravam com elle. Asneira tinha elle feito em retirar metade da banca logo no principio. Pensavam todos o mesmo, invejosos, seguindo em silencio o movimento do baralho. —«Falta a ultima, amigo Motta, e ahi é que a porca torce o rabo— disse o padre Mathias, de pé, com os tentos apertados na mão de mistura com cédulas já de ganho. Quando o Maximiano tornou a receber cartas olhou-as indifferente, pô las em cima da meza diante de si e continuou meio voltado a conversar com o juiz. O Motta, esperançado de que elle não jogasse, deu confiadamente o resto das cartas. —«Oh, doutor—disse o conselheiro para o juiz, que, a cantarolar um estribilho muito da sua cabeça desafinada, ia já a voltar para outro lado—você não joga? —«Não senhor! O jogo é uma ladroeira. —«Parece-lhe? —«Pois pudéra! Então parece-lhe bem que alli aquelle senhor ganhasse vinte e cinco mil reis a sua esposa d’um instante para o
- 63. outro? —«O dinheiro fez-se para girar, meu caro. Quer que todos façam tulha de libras como o senhor? —«Eu, sim!? Sou um pobretana. —«Todos os honestos dizem o mesmo. Devia jogar para enriquecer. Eu gosto do jogo porque é a imagem da vida. Os pacatos, os que seguem sómente o caminho trilhado por outras pessoas mais experientes, esses não arruinam os banqueiros nem perdem as casas, quando muito perdem... a linha. Os que são capazes de arrojar uma fortuna sobre uma carta, são tambem capazes de tudo arriscar para chegar onde a ambição lhes pôz os olhos... —«Jóga, senhor Conselheiro?—perguntou, officioso, o tabellião. —«Tópo. E a carta voltada fez-lhe passar para a mão todo o dinheiro que estava sendo a cubiça dos outros. O Motta, a pretexto de cansaço, levantou-se a tomar ar. Estava desesperado. Com o seu eterno sorriso de bonhomia, começava o Maximiano a contar o dinheiro para pôr na banca, quando a filha entrou pelo braço do Vilhegas, dizendo com a sua vózinha aguda atirada com petulancia: —«Oh papá, não imagina como o sr. Vilhegas e eu nos entendemos bem! Sabe historias deliciosas e lindos versos para a guitarra.—Chegando ao pé da meza e mudando de tom:—O papá é que faz banca? Hade ser vacca, sim?—E para o Emygdio, torcendo- se risonha: aposto que tambem não sabe o que é fazer uma vacca? —«Ah, isso sei por experiencia... de perder. Muitas vezes em Coimbra me pediram dinheiro para ellas. —«E não ganhou nunca?
- 64. —«Creio que não, porque nunca mo deram.—Respondeu já senhor de si, vaidoso por se ver recebido com tanta expansão pela filha do grande politico, cujo lendario talento era ainda ponto de fé, até para os adversarios. —«Parece incrivel que não saiba jogo algum. Je ne crois pas! —«É tão completa a minha ignorancia que até me parece que serei incapaz de vir a aprender. —«Nem o bluff? —«Esse menos do que nenhum, nem mesmo sei o que é. —«C’est incroyable! É um jogo d’enganos; só pelas cartas serem differentes já tem graça. Pode ganhar-se sem ter jogo nenhum, é questão de finura. Olhe, o papá ganha sempre e com jogos ordinarissimos. Engana toda a gente. —«Realmente sou um grande ignorante. Preciso aprender algum d’esses jogos, já não digo todos... —«Deveras? Então eu ensino-o... —«Pois desde já prometto ser o mais submisso dos discipulos. —«A sério? —«Muito a sério. —«Oh, mas é delicioso!... Aprenderá comigo todos os jogos, sim!?... —«Todos que V. Ex.ᵃ souber. —«Mas se eu sei todos! Vamos já hoje começar a lição? —«Com todo o gosto. —«Mas... por qual? Oh papá, o que heide ensinar primeiro? —«O burro, que é o que tu sabes melhor. Toda a sala riu da graça do conselheiro.
- 65. —«Bom, lá está o Papá a fazer troça... Imagina que eu não sei jogo nenhum porque não tenho a prática que o Papá tem?!... Ora espere, venha cá,—e correu ao fundo onde estava uma pequena meza de pé de gallo.—Oh sr. Motta, dê me cá esses castiçaes.—O Móttasinho, que ia a entrar, correu a executar a ordem.—Accenda- os, faça favor. Merci. Agora os marcadores, as cartas do bézigue, bom! Sente-se aqui, sr. Vilhegas, vou ensinar-lhe um jogo engraçadissimo, por ser só de duas pessoas—um verdadeiro tête à tête. —«Um encanto, principalmente quando uma d’ellas é V. Ex.ᵃ. —«Comme vous êtes aimable, merci bien. —«Não digo mais de que V. Ex.ᵃ merece. —Sabe uma coisa? Eu gosto mais que me tratem por Mademoiselle Hortense. É assim que todos me tratam e eu estou tão habituada a fallar francez desde o collegio, que ás vezes dou ordens aos criados e só quando os vejo olhar para mim com caras de parvos, é que percebo que elles não comprehenderam porque fallei francez. É quasi a minha lingua... —«Pois se Mademoiselle deseja, fallaremos tambem em francez. —«Pois falla? —«Alguma coisa. —«Oh, mas o que me espanta é que sendo um homem tão educado e intelligente possa viver n’uma terra da provincia como esta. Viver toda a vida n’uma aldeia, oh que horror!—e deitava a cabeça para traz n’um gesto verdadeiramente de horrorizada. —«Vamos ao nosso jogo?—desviou a conversa o Emygdio, vendo que todos o observavam e que no dia seguinte os proprios partidarios invejosos espalhariam pela terra o acolhimento que elle tivera em casa do chefe da opposição. —«C’est vrai. J’avais oublié! Ma pauvre tête! Repare bem, pega-se na primeira dama e no primeiro rei que nos veem á mão e faz-se um
- 66. casamento. —«O que se chama aqui um casamento? —«É apresentar os dois juntos, é uma especie de casamento civil... —«Que é lá isso, que é lá isso, perguntou da roda do polis o padre cura.—Já fallam em casamento, sem me ouvirem em confissão?!...— e riu da graçola, a que o Móttasinho achou muito chiste. —«Não são d’esses casamentos—respondeu com imperturbavel serenidade mademoiselle Hortense—são casamentos sem padres. Duram apenas o tempo da partida e dispensam bençãos papaes. Casamentos nouveau style. É um jogo delicioso, não acha mr. Vilhegas? —«Divino, minha senhora!...
- 67. VII Primeiro do que ninguem tinha o dr. José Ramalho chegado á estação para esperar os viscondes, que vinham no ultimo comboio. Mal se começavam a reunir os empregados, bocejantes, e os guardas tinham apenas accendido os candieiros de petroleo, com as torcidas em bicos fumarentos, que mal alumiavam a sala de espera. —«Uma bôa estafa este comboio das onze da noite! —«E hoje então que a Viscondessa hade trazer pr’a-hi um rôr de bagagens! —«Ficam p’rá manhã. —«Isso ficam ellas!... O chefe, antão... Se fosse cô oitros, não digo menos, mas cô estes é todo politicas...—Conversavam dois carregadores, encostados á hombreira da porta, na espera ociosa e enfastiada que precede a hora da tabella, cortada a espaços pelo resoar da campainha electrica que nos sobresalta alegremente como voz amiga que já nos falla dos que esperâmos, dizendo-nos a sua aproximação. O doutor estava, contra o costume, n’uma disposição de espirito arrelienta, nervoso, maldisposto, com vontade de implicar e dizer mal. Aproveitando a liberdade que o seu logar de medico da companhia lhe dava, levantou o balcão e pela casa das bagagens atravessou para a gare, que estava ainda em profunda treva. —«Então o que é isto!? Hoje não accendem as luzes?—perguntou mal humorado aos homens que o tinham seguido. —«Ainda não deu a partida, senhor doutor.
- 68. —«Ora adeus! Accendam isso que são horas—commandou energico, emquanto os outros, vencidos, iam de má vontade buscar um caixote para chegar aos candieiros. Começou de passear para acalmar os nervos, e de momento a momento parava, olhava o mostrador de duas faces do relogio da estação, puxava da algibeira o seu remontoir, e confrontava-os, achando sempre que ambos deviam estar atrazados. Chegava a Viscondessa, causa unica e involuntaria d’aquella agitação... Para que negá-lo? Era um sonho de muitos annos, a porção incorporea e ingenua do seu sentir, o ideal que lhe tornava supportavel a vida trabalhosa, solteira de affectos. Julgavam-no egoista, solteirão incorrigivel, todo avesso a phantasias amorosas, e afinal... Desde muito novo que esbarrára n’aquelle sonhar impossiveis que lhe fechára olhos e coração a qualquer outro sentimento. Nunca sentira necessidade de confessar-lhe, nem a si proprio, mesmo, quanto havia de profundo amôr no interesse que ella lhe inspirava. Para quê, afinal? Era tão feliz na doçura tépida e confiante d’aquella amizade fraternal, que nem mesmo queria averiguar o que de vulgar e humano ella continha. Para que perturbar esse enlevo com a materialisação d’um sonho, que na realidade não passaria d’uma vulgar intriga? Depois, a Viscondessa era d’uma honestidade tão simples e consciente, e com tanta graça e tanta nobreza sustentada, que nem a sombra de uma suspeita impura ousaria roçar-lhe pela alma. E era ainda por isso que mais a estimava, que a adorava, quasi—porque era adoração o que sentia ao vê-la tão serena e tão bôa, tão intellectual e distincta! Tinha vontade de ajoelhar, silencioso, resignado, e até feliz na passividade do extasi. Elle, que era um tanto rude na franqueza do dizer, achava, para as suas intimas conversas de bons amigos, phrases d’uma tão carinhosa ternura como só as sabe ter um coração de mãe.
- 69. Tão pouco humano, tão desinteressado era aquelle affecto, que não sentia pelo Visconde a mais leve repulsão. Se não eram amigos, como era natural que o não fossem, sendo tão fundamentalmente dispares, era-lhe todavia dedicado bastante para o auxiliar politicamente, e para lhe ser até agradavel a sua intima convivencia. Invejava-lhe um pouco, talvez,—criancices de amoroso—a delicadeza do seu perfil aristocratico, a maneira requintada de vestir, a simplicidade suprema com que punha o alfinete de perola na gravata de setim preto, collocava uma flôr na botoeira, guiava um carro ou fallava sobre arte. Amá-lo-ia a Viscondessa por essas miudas preoccupações que tornam certos homens tão queridos á maioria das mulheres? Mas o Visconde não era sómente isso, e decerto a mulher, cujo espirito adquirira com a convivencia vibratilidades d’artista, amava muito esse homem, dilletante na politica como na arte, colleccionador por moda, um pouco litterato e um pouco sportsman; sempre distincto, invejado e imitado. Casados por paixão, era evidente que se amariam como no principio. E era tão natural—pensava por vezes o doutor—primos chegados, a mesma educação e tradição de familia, fortunas eguaes, não tendo uma recordação que pelos dois não fosse partilhada, deviam amar-se e ser felizes como pareciam, como toda a gente queria, apezar da delicada reserva com que se abordavam. Pensava incoherentemente todas essas coisas, percorrendo em largas passadas regulares o restricto espaço da plataforma onde chegava a luz. Toda a tensão de nervos se lhe conhecia no mordiscar febril do charuto e no franzir da testa a cada momento. Assim se conservava ainda, quando a gare foi invadida pelas pessôas importantes da terra, que vinham, como elle, esperar os viscondes. O Braga, azafamado, empurrando todos, grosseirão e bruto, n’uma grande preoccupação de ser sempre o primeiro. O Neves, o Domingos, as meninas Souzas e as Costas, com vestidos
- 70. d’um exagero que pretendiam ser a moda, olhando-se invejosas por cada fita ou flor a mais que qualquer d’ellas pozesse. Até as sr.ᵃˢ Rebellos, com chapéos de repolhudas flores vermelhas atados ás velhas caras rugosas, que o pó d’arroz tentava amaciar; o juiz, arrastando a perna gottosa encostado ao chapéo de chuva e á bengala, tencionando já pedir desculpa pela falta da mulher, motivada por doença, diria, mas em verdade porque não quizera alugar carro, e assim, a meias com o delegado, o dr. Pinto e o escrivão sahia-lhe mais barato. Não, que era preciso fazer economias, desde que os emolumentos do crime se iam pela agua abaixo e era uma raridade um bom inventario... Depois, ainda, os partidarios certos do visconde e aquelles que não sabiam ainda para onde se virar. O doutor, que estava sempre disposto a aturar aquella gente com a inestancavel paciencia de medico e de politico, não poude n’essa noite vê-los sem que o espirito se lhe confrangesse n’uma repulsão instinctiva, que o fez affastar para a sombra, propositadamente, com vontade de criticar, de ter alguem com quem podesse fallar, alguem de muita confiança que o desculpasse sem tentar comprehender aquelle estado de espirito, que torna os homens, mais do que as mulheres, intractaveis em questões de amôr. Quando por fim o João appareceu, foi-lhe ao encontro, de mão estendida, sem se importar com os outros. —«Já cá estava, e eu fui por sua casa para o trazer no carro— disse-lhe logo o João. —«Obrigado pela lembrança; não tinha que fazer, vim a pé por ahi abaixo. Se soubesse que tinha tão bôa companhia, esperava, decerto. Mas o agradecimento é o mesmo. —«Não tem nada a agradecer, o favor era para mim. A mamã pediu-me para acompanhar a Candida e como o tête-à-tête me não é agradavel ia procurar o meu amigo para o trazer comnosco. —«E vieram juntos? Desculpa a curiosidade.
- 71. —«Vim a governar, e ella dentro. Espere... Venha cá,—levados naturalmente por egual desejo de solidão, tinham-se refugiado na sombra, e d’ahi vira o João chegar o Vilhegas junto da Candida, que se endireitava soberba, em plena luz—repare com que intimidade elles se fallam!... E ainda o doutor diz que não ha nada! Dava tudo por os ouvir!...—Agitadissimo apertava o braço do medico, como se quizesse com a poderosa tensão do seu espirito aprehender as palavras que os outros a distancia trocavam. A Candida, ainda de preto,—que teimava em usar porque descobrira que lhe adelgaçava o busto cheio, e lhe fazia sobresahir o brancomate da pelle e o castanho loiro dos cabellos,—estava formosissima. Alta, silenciosa e grave entre a multidão remexida das pequenas provincianas, com um grande chapéo de rendas e plumas todo preto a completar a toilette muito leve e custosamente simples, e com o seu glorioso ar de desdem, ella era na verdade a soberba materia que avassalla as almas. O Emygdio curvou-se rendido. —«Onde esteve hontem?—murmurou incisiva, irritante, tratando-o propositadamente por senhor. —«Hontem, hontem... —«Não se canse a procurar mentiras. Sei que foi a casa do Maximiano. Fallou com M.ᵉˡˡᵉ Hortense?...—frisou, ironica. —«Quem t’o disse? —«Que te importa? Sei que foste; se lá voltas acabarei com tudo. —«Mas isso é um desproposito; fui lá, é verdade, mas só vi o Conselheiro, juro-te!—tentava convencer, afflicto, temendo que n’um d’esses ataques de ciumes ella o compromettesse escandalosa e irremediavelmente. Perdê-la, quasi o não incommodava já. Era formosa na verdade, mas d’uma exigencia tão absorvente que ha muito o desgostára, a
- 72. elle que não era um artista que pozesse na belleza a aspiração suprema da sua idiosyncrasia. Desde a morte da Pillar que tentava fugir-lhe, mas, sem um pretexto que o desculpasse, agarrara-se agora áquelle da vinda do João e á necessidade de por isso espaçar as visitas para fugir um pouco áquella pressão esmagadora. A sua intelligencia inferiorisada pela ambição obscurecia-se por completo n’um pavor de tortura, quando assim a via imperiosa e enygmatica, fascinando-o apezar de tudo. —«O que dizes?—perguntou com ironia, olhando-o d’alto. —«Decerto não irei sempre, mas... —«Ah!... Oh sr. Braga—chamou ella o velho, que a contemplava embasbacado havia momentos, coisa que lhe não escapára—quer acompanhar-me até junto de meu primo? —«Oh, minha senhora!—gaguejou o ricaço, offerecendo presuroso o braço onde ella mal tocou com a ponta dos dedos enluvados. Com a sua grossa mão vermelhuça puxou-lhe o braço para cima e não soube senão dizer com uma ternura bruta: —«Que felicidade, que felicidade!... —«O quê, sr. Braga, acha felicidade que eu lhe peça um favor? —«Se acho! Dava contos de réis para que fosse toda a vida assim! —córado até ao extremo violaceo da apoplexia, esforçava-se por dizer alguma coisa que podesse agradar áquella mulher, que havia uns tempos, desde que o Padre Mathias na botica velha dissera aquellas coisas, lhe andava a pôr doida a cabeça; que d’antes só as cifras enchiam. —«Tanto dinheiro por uma coisa tão insignificante e tão natural!... Não valia a pena, sr. Braga!—respondeu meiga, com uma voz quebrada que acabou de atordoar o homem. —«Lá isso valia, até tudo o que tenho! E olhe que é p’ra mais de duzentos contos—regougou o animal.
- 73. —«E vive aqui!... Um apito prolongado do comboio ao longe terminou as conversas, na mesma curiosidade de todos que aguardavam os Viscondes, trazidos por desencontrados desejos e interesses. —«Como viria vestida a Viscondessa?—perguntavam as mulheres. —«Como os receberia o Visconde—a si mesmos perguntavam os homens que na politica punham a sua ambição. A machina avançava, cuspindo brazas, offegante, deixando fugir a força com o vapor que se lhe ennovelava em cabelleira. As lanternas vermelha e amarella furavam a noite como dois olhos de monstro phantastico que avançava esbaforido, chocando-se em traquinada de molas e correntes. Na plataforma todos se agitavam, adiantando-se, querendo ser vistos primeiro. O chefe empertigou-se com a bandeirinha verde na mão, obrigando com o seu gesto imperioso a retirar os mais atrevidos. Atraz da machina seguiram os wagons carregados de saccos fedorentos de guano para as terras, depois as bagagens, a terceira classe com soldados e maltezes que vinham das ceifas do Alemtejo, estremunhados, espreguiçando-se ás janellas... E o comboio, que mal se arrastava já sob a pressão dos travões, parou por fim n’um choque que se prolongou até ás ultimas carruagens. O wagon-leito ficou um pouco acima e todos correram açodados a cumprimentar o Visconde, que se apeou logo, esbelto ainda, mesmo bonito homem apezar dos cabellos que iam branqueando na aproximação dos quarenta. Mal puzera pé em terra e logo os vigorosos braços do Domingos o apertavam n’uma expansão perdoavel a um partidario tão intransigente. O Visconde deixava-se abraçar por todos, tendo uma palavra para cada um, sorrisonho e amavel, apezar d’uma vaga sombra de cansaço, sustentando com distincção o difficil papel de politico acclamado pelo seu burgo.
- 74. Logo a seguir appareceu a Viscondessa, á portinhola, vestida de azul escuro, gravata de seda branca, chapéo que uma simples fita enfeitava, sorrindo bondosa, recebendo com egual deferencia todos os cumprimentos. Só quando o dr. Ramalho e o João conseguiram aproximar-se é que a sua physionomia muito movel se abriu n’um lampejo de sincero contentamento. Acceitando as mãos que ambos lhe offereceram saltou para o chão, dizendo n’um sorriso de intimidade que raro prodigalisava: —«Já me tardavam!... Como tem passado, doutor?... Como está tua mãe, João? —«Como a prima pode imaginar!... —«Sim, faço ideia! Se ámanhã a mamã não estiver muito fatigada irei abraçar a minha pobre Josephina. —«Como é bôa e como lho agradeço—murmurou o João commovido. —«A sr.ᵃ D. Genoveva fez bem a jornada?—interrogou o medico cuidadoso. —«É muito longa, deixa-a fatigada por uns dias, mas apezar d’isso não está mal. Para se não incommodar com cumprimentos, pedi-lhe que ficasse na carruagem com a D. Luzia até nós retirarmos. —«Foi bem pensado. É preciso a maior cautella com aquelles nervos—respondeu o dr. Ramalho. —«Nervos?!... Emfim, pode ser!... Mas venham cá; vem cá, João, que te quero apresentar uma pessôa que muito estimo. —«E que eu não conheço?—«Nem eu tambem?—inquiriram os dois a um tempo. —«O doutor conhece, tu é que não—e voltando-se chamou para dentro da carruagem—«oh Bella!» —«Estava a procurar a minha malinha na confusão das vossas malas, malinhas, embrulhos, cabazes... Sei lá o que para ahi vem!— veio dizendo, ao mesmo tempo que saltava da carruagem, uma
- 75. delicada figura de mulher, vestida de flanella branca riscada de azul, chapéo remador de palha branca, collarinho e gravata, e no bolso do casaco o lenço de linho fito, n’um geito um tanto masculino. —«Oh meu caro doutor, como está, como tem passado desde o inverno?!...—dirigiu-se ao medico, n’uma grande expansão de amizade, a que elle correspondia affectuoso. —«Minha filha—sorriu a Viscondessa—guarda para logo os teus comprimentos ao doutor, que já é conhecido velho, agora deixa-me apresentar-te o meu primo João de Mello. —«Escusas de dizer mais, conheço-o perfeitamente—respondeu séria, estendendo-lhe a mão, para um shake-hands, á ingleza, e dizendo com uma naturalidade encantadora.—A Maria Helena descreveu-mo de tal maneira que o reconheceria em qualquer parte. —«Se tu o conheces—acudiu a Viscondessa, rindo—não te conhece elle, que não teve quem, tão bem como eu, te descrevesse. É preciso apresentar-te:—Isabella Burns, a minha maior e melhor amiga. —«Certainly—terminou rindo Isabella. —«Podemos partir—veio dizer o Visconde. —«Quando quizeres. —«Entrega a relação das bagagens ao Bernardo. Como o comboio não passa hoje d’aqui, não haverá confusão. —«Pois sim.—Abrindo a carteira de coiro da Russia onde brilhava o oiro do monogramma e a corôa, tirou um papel que entregou ao administrador, curvado para receber as ordens e comprimentar Sua Ex.ᵃ:—Veio o coupé para minha mãe? —«Sim, sr.ᵃ Viscondessa. —«Tenha cautella, Bernardo, olhe se os cavallos estão folgados que vão muito depressa... —«V. Ex.ᵃ pode confiar em mim.
- 76. —«Bem sei, tenho toda a confiança no seu juizo, mas por isso mesmo não quero que entregue esta obrigação a ninguem. —«V. Ex.ᵃ pode ir descançada. —«Bem, bem—e voltou ainda á carruagem, a fazer as mesmas recommendações. —«Quem é aquella senhora que o Visconde cumprimentou?— perguntava Izabella, acceitando o braço de João. —«É minha prima. —«Apresenta-ma? —«Da melhor vontade, mas... perdôa-me a indiscrição d’uma pergunta? Para que deseja essa apresentação? —«Ora para quê!? Porque é muito bonita e quero admirá-la de perto. Ri-se? —«Não rio; é que acho um pouco estranho esse desejo. —«Estranho em quê? Eu admiro a belleza, e onde quer que a encontro gosto de a contemplar. —«É que, em geral, as senhoras não costumam fallar com essa justiça da belleza das outras. —«Que me importa o que as outras fazem, se eu não sou como ellas?!... —«Tem cautella, João, olha que a Bella faz da vida um paradoxo e a maior parte das vezes não pensa exactamente o que diz—disse a Viscondessa, que vinha logo atraz pelo braço do doutor. —«Agora é sómente o que penso, sem exaggero nenhum. Desejar vêr de perto uma mulher bonita, parece-me que não é nada extraordinario. Vá, venha apresentar-nos. Como se tornava impossivel alcançar o Visconde e a Candida, apertados e embaraçados por toda aquella gente que queria sahir a um tempo, chamou alto o Visconde, que se voltou logo e esperou com o seu amavel sorriso de homem galante. E foi alli, entre o
- 77. gargalhar de toda aquella gente que se sentia feliz da sua propria importancia, que o João apresentou a Candida, um pouco contrafeita sob o claro olhar perscrutador de Izabella. —«A sr.ᵃ D. Candida quer dar-nos a honra de ir na tua carruagem —disse o Visconde á mulher. —«Com o maior prazer. —«A sua carruagem é fechada, Visconde?—Bella interrogou. —«É esta victoria, que trouxeram fechada, não sei para quê. —«Que pena, com uma noite d’estas!—sahindo para fóra, continuou—mas de quem é então aquelle phaeton tão bonitinho? —«É meu, e se me atrevesse punha-o á disposição de V. Ex.ᵃ— respondeu João. —«Mas porque se não hade atrever?! Ah!...—E, como fallando comsigo,—que sensaboria! —«O que dizias?—perguntou a Viscondessa. —«Nada!... Olha lá, parecerá mal ir no carro de teu primo—disse a meia voz, n’uma resposta que era uma pergunta. —«Sósinha, não... Mas pode ir mais alguem, parece me que são poucos os carros para tanta gente. —«Pode ir o doutor... —«O doutor, não—emendou o João apressado—como V. Ex.ᵃ prefere o meu carro, vae o dr. Ramalho com os primos e eu vou convidar as sr.ᵃˢ Rebellos e o Domingos que vieram a pé. —«As manas Rebellos e o boticario, não é? Já conheço tudo por tradição; chame-os depressa, olhe que fogem,—apressou Izabella, batendo as palmas satisfeitissima, empurrando-o quasi para o lado onde o Domingos e as cunhadas já estavam fazendo as suas despedidas ao Visconde. Pouco depois, todos acamados como foi possivel, puzeram-se as carruagens em marcha com a gravidade ceremoniosa d’um
- 79. VIII A tarde alongava-se n’um crepusculo aguarellado em leves tintas doiradas, com longes de porcelana japoneza e recortes miudinhos nos primeiros planos. No terraço, illuminado pela luz do poente sem agonias, as rosas- chá abriam-se aromaticas e dôces. A viscondessa, reclinada n’uma cadeira da Ilha com baldaquinos bordados, fitava os olhos na Vesper,—que era um ponto mais brilhante no oiro em que o sol se fundia—n’um alheamento, n’um abandono de si mesma, que a puzera triste, d’essa inexplicavel tristeza que infiltram na alma as tardes assim bellas e silenciosas. O vestido leve de seda escura, com enfeites de renda preta, contrastava fortemente com a pallidez marfinea do rosto. O cabello castanho simplesmente penteado descobria-lhe a fronte alta de intelligencia e juizo claro. A bocca, d’um córte rasgado, trazia-a franzida n’um sorriso de paciente melancolia, que ás vezes se azedava n’um leve sarcasmo de quem muito conhece, e de muito a conhecer se irrita, com as mentiras da sociedade. Alta e elegante, o seu corpo tinha ficado delgado, de mulher que nunca tivera filhos, apezar dos trinta e cinco annos que ia contando. Mas o que sobre tudo agradava n’ella era a maneira senhoril, nobre e consciente e ao mesmo tempo desafectada de andar, de sorrir, de fallar para todos e em qualquer assumpto com as palavras precisas, sem um gesto a mais nem uma pausa de menos, como se toda a sua pessoa tivesse sido harmonicamente feita n’um mundo superior de materia differente da dos outros. O creado, que chegára á porta, perguntava pela terceira ou quarta vez—se sua ex.ᵃ poderia receber o sr. dr. João Ramalho. —«Mande entrar para aqui—respondeu como que acordando.
- 80. Emquanto o creado ia transmittir a ordem, ella endireitava-se na cadeira para receber o doutor, a quem estendeu a mão branca de dedos afusados, e disse alegremente, n’um afugentar de maus pensamentos que a alliviava: —«Ainda bem que veiu, doutor, principiava a entristecer, com esta luz, este céo, esta solidão... —«Como era só principio, ainda venho a tempo de evitar maior tristeza—respondeu a sorrir, ao mesmo tempo que se sentava na cadeira defronte. Se é que a minha companhia póde distrahir alguem!... —«Aquelles que sinceramente nos estimam, são sempre a companhia que mais nos deve distrahir. Não é verdade? —«Assim deve ser. —«E quantas vezes não é!... —«Não admira, o que não deve ser é o que mais acontece cá por este mundo. —«É verdade... —«O Visconde? —«Deve ter sahido a cavallo, como costuma, antes de jantar. Talvez esteja na bibliotheca, ou tenha visitas... Não lho posso dizer ao certo. Só nos reunimos ao jantar, e para isso é ainda cedo— concluiu, olhando para o cinto onde, preso a uma agrafe d’oiro esmaltado, trazia um pequenino relogio de crystal. —«Em Lisboa sei que é esse o costume, pelos muitos affazeres do Visconde, mas julguei que aqui lhe pertencesse mais, n’esta liberdade de férias no campo. —«Não, para nós é já um habito. Depois, aqui tem a politica que o absorve e distrahe: ouvir um influente, attender a outro, escrever cartas e fazer combinações... Toda essa embrulhada, a que sou perfeitamente estranha.
- 81. —«Não se interessa então nada pela politica?—respondendo ao signal de negativa que ella fez com a cabeça, continuou—Imaginei que sim. Tenho-a tido sempre como um poderoso elemento na influencia partidaria do Visconde. —«Porquê? —«Porque a vejo sempre amavel para os influentes, conhecendo- lhes os fracos e os interesses... —«Sómente para fazer a vontade ao Duarte, que é a unica coisa que me pede com interesse. Mas é contra minha vontade que elle se mette n’esta vergonha da politica. Os de cá, os pequenos, como os de lá, os grandes, é tudo afinal a mesma coisa. Egoistas, ambiciosos, interesseiros, não ha um unico que queira vêr a miseria em que a patria agonisa e se sacrifique para a salvar. E se algum apparecesse, os outros affastá-lo-iam como um perigo para as suas bolsas que o thezoiro enche... Debaixo a cima, a lucta furiosa d’ambições para chegar ao poder; depois... ninguem se salva... O que me desgosta é vêr o Duarte viver com elles, ter os mesmos ideaes estreitos, acceitar os mesmos compromissos para identicos fins. Elle, que é pessoalmente honesto, politicamente iguala-se ao Maximiano Carneiro—porque é igualar-se tê-lo como adversario. —«Não diga tal, Viscondessa! Pois não a consola que seu marido seja apontado entre os partidos da rotação como um dos raros honestos? —«Sim, nada do que nós temos nos veiu com a politica, mas isso, meu amigo, é a honradez vulgar do creado de servir que não tira o dinheiro ao patrão mas vê sem protestos os outros encherem as algibeiras. —«Não crê que em volta do nome honrado do visconde se forme um partido novo a que se juntem as almas ainda impollutas dos moços, cheios de coragem para luctar, resignação para a miseria, e esperança no futuro? —«Não creio n’esse dôce sonho côr de rosa. Em primeiro logar porque os novos já não são como ha vinte annos os depositarios dos
- 82. enthusiasmos e das grandes ideias altruistas. Tem-se educado a mocidade para politicos e empregados publicos. Os independentes são uma pequena minoria, que os proprios companheiros alcunham de doidos... Os homens práticos n’este paiz são os que aos vinte annos só teem confiança... nos empenhos. —«Como está descrente! O Visconde ainda fará alguma coisa, verá... —«Não creio, o Duarte transige com os meios, e para salvar isto seria preciso não haver transigencias de qualidade alguma. Seria preciso cortar fundo e a direito, sem olhar absolutamente a conveniencias pessoaes. —«Quer então um novo Pombal?!...—perguntou o medico, rindo. —«Sem as barbaridades que deslustraram a sua bella obra de resurgimento patrio. Viesse elle!... —«É então por esse ideal... sebastianico, que lhe não interessa a politica contemporanea?! —«Decerto! A não ser que o doutor me explique o que o paiz ganha e o que póde advir de grande e compensador para a collectividade portugueza, com a entrada do sr. Domingos da botica para a vereação da camara municipal, ou com a realisação do empenho do Braga, em fazer expropriar a casa do Bernabé, porque affronta o seu chalet mirabolante de burguez endinheirado e estupido. Sim, o meu bom amigo, que é tambem politico, poderá explicar-me essas vantagens... —«Eu sou um politico... d’agua morna. Auxilio o Visconde por amizade, e acceitei, como sabe, ser deputado por um circulo qualquer para que elle tenha mais um voto na camara... Nunca me encommodei com os meus constituintes, que teem tido o bom senso de não pensarem tambem no seu representante. —«Quer isso dizer que o doutor, que em toda a sua vida particular não tem uma mancha a enodoar lhe o nome, acha que é natural ser representante d’um povo porque o governo lhe disse que o fosse?!
- 83. Acceita isso, e acha até muito natural que se faça, o que n’um paiz civicamente bem educado se não faria; e porquê? Porque é politica. Triste palavra que tanta coisa má faz desculpar! Os senhores não creem nos homens que seguem; não teem partido porque não teem convicções!... —«Mas isso é quasi uma descompostura...—disse de bom humor o medico. —«Talvez, mas justa, confesse. Um de meus avós recusou representar uma das nossas colonias nas famosas côrtes da regencia de Izabel Maria, porque era impossivel, materialmente impossivel por falta de tempo, apresentar-se eleito pelos seus constituintes com legalidade, visto que as viagens duravam seis mezes e as côrtes constituiram-se em dois... Então, um homem cheio de filhos e responsabilidades, não se importou de desobedecer a uma ordem que ia de encontro á sua consciencia, e agora? Os mais honestos teem a philosophia do doutor. Os homens teem uma consciencia mais lata... —«E as mulheres fariam outra coisa, minha senhora feminista? —«Oh, as mulheres não são melhores, porque nem mesmo querem dar-se ao trabalho de pensar. Se ellas pozessem no bem da patria e da familia a energia que dispendem em futilidades, alguma coisa poderiam fazer... —«Se todas fossem como a Viscondessa decerto que o melhor que teriamos a fazer era ser governados... —«Não perca os seus madrigaes commigo, meu caro. —«Mas é sinceramente que digo isto, tenha a certeza. —«Pois então digo-lhe que está enganado. Quanto mais banal e frivola é a mulher, mais influencia tem no espirito do homem, até ás vezes os mais intelligentes. Na nossa sociedade, que se apregôa a ultima palavra da civilisação, raramente a mulher é a companheira do homem. Elle quer ser senhor; ella, como todo o escravo,
- 84. corrompe-o. Ora esse papel é baixo e uma alma superior de mulher nunca se sujeita a elle, prefere a sombra da sua modestia... —«Mas, se a Viscondessa me permitte uma observação... —«Diga. —«Parece-me que V. Ex.ᵃ não poderá queixar-se nunca porque é, felizmente, uma excepção a essa regra; o seu lucidissimo espirito deve exercer no do visconde uma salutar influencia. —«Está enganado; meu marido, como a maior parte dos homens, dispensa o espirito... caseiro. —«É d’uma ironia pungente—respondeu o doutor, admirado do que ouvia, tão differente do que imaginára. Depois d’um instante de silencio, em que as suas almas se comprehenderam talvez, melhor do que em annos de convivencia, elle perguntou: —«Ha quanto tempo casaram? —«O que lhe diz o thermometro? —«Que o mercurio ainda não gelou... —«Nem gelará, descance!—respondeu sorrindo e encostando o cotovello a uma pequena meza de jardim.—Temos uma temperatura de estufa, elegante, cuidadosa e sabiamente entretida. Estamos livres das grandes temperaturas tropicaes como dos resfriamentos polares. —«Permitta-me que duvide um pouco d’essa theoria de velhos egoistas em gente tão moça?! —«Moços?! Não é tanto assim, sabe que idade tenho? —«Cálculo trinta... creio que não se importa que o diga. —«Engana se, tenho trinta e cinco. —«Somos quasi da mesma idade, eu tenho trinta e oito. —«Tem graça que só hoje fizessemos esta descoberta. —«Quando eu vim para aqui era a Viscondessa quasi uma criança.
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