Event individuation by objects
Résumé
Adverbially-interpreted temporal frequency adjectives (FAs) such as frequent, sporadic,
and daily, are usually restricted to modifying event-denoting nominals (e.g. The house underwent
frequent cleanings = Frequently, the house underwent cleanings vs. We saw frequent sailors/the
frequent sailor 6= Frequently, we saw sailors/the sailor). In this, they contrast with what Gehrke
and McNally (2012) refer to as nontemporal FAs (e.g. odd, cp. The occasional sailor strolled by =
Occasionally, a sailor strolled by). However, there is a systematic set of exceptions to this generalization,
e.g. She wrote frequent letters, which have never been explained. In this paper we provide
an analysis of these exceptional cases. Our account points to interesting parallelisms between
the construction of interest and Kennedy’s (2012) use of Kratzer’s (1996) Event Identification to
account for event measurement via measure expressions on incremental themes. It also situates
this use of FAs within the family of semantic incorporation constructions, providing a novel example
of how the varied morphosyntactic resources of a language can make it possible to fulfill
the pragmatic functions that incorporation constructions serve for a wide variety of propositional
contents.
Domaines
Linguistique
Origine :
Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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