Primitives of Events and the Semantic Representation
Hongzhi Xu, Chu‐Ren Huang · 2013
The event structure (aktionsart) is a widely discussed issue for the representation of verbal semantics in languages. However, there is still problems for the classification of verbs into state, activity, accomplishment, achievement and semelfactive. It is also not clear where are the differences of them embedded in terms of lexical, semantic or syntactic levels. In this paper, we will give a discussion on the primitives of events from an ontological point of view. We suggest that event types should be discussed in the usage level of language. Based on the Generative Lexicon theory, we provide a semantic representation of verbs which can give a better explanation how the semantics of verbs and the composition with their complements can determine the event type they denote. 1