This study establishes a relation between the semantics of the subject and the direct object-NP and aspect. The notion of event is central. Events have a beginning and an end. This means in temporal terms that events have a point in time at which they begin and a point in time at which they end. However, events are not defined in temporal terms but in spatial terms. This means that they are defined in terms of the entity that can be used to identify their beginning and the entity that can be used to identify their end. These two entitites are denoted by the subject and the direct object-NP respectively. The name of the event is provided by the verb. It is these three notions that make up Event Structure: the entity denoting the beginning, i.e. the object of origin; the entity denoting the end, i.e. the object of termination; and the event itself. The three primitives are independently motivated in the domain of tense interpretations of sentences. Their presence or absence affects these interpretations in a systematic way.

First detailed survey of research into event structure; Interdisciplinary approach, with insights from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science; Explores both foundational research and new cutting edge developments -

This volume addresses the problem of how language expresses conceptual information on event structures and how such information can be reconstructed in the interpretation process. The papers present important new insights into recent semantic and syntactic research on the topic. The volume deals with the following problems in detail: event structure and syntactic construction, event structure and modification, event structure and plurality, event structure and temporal relation, event structure and situation aspect, and event structure and language ontology. Importantly, the topic is discussed not only on the basis of English and German but on the basis of other languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and Igbo as well. This volume thus provides solid evidence towards clarifying the empirical use of event based analyses.

This book makes an original contribution to the understanding of perception verbs and the treatment of argument structure, and offers new insights on lexical causation, evidentiality, and processes of cognition. Perception verbs - such as look, see, taste, hear, feel, sound, and listen - present unresolved problems for theories of lexical semantics. This book examines the relations between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in verbs like seem and sound. In unravelling their complexity Nikolas Gisborne looks closely at their meanings, modality, semantic relatedness, and irregularity. He frames his exposition in Word Grammar, and draws extensively on work in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. After an opening chapter explaining the nature of the issues, Dr Gisborne presents a concise introduction to Word Grammar. He then considers the implications of his approach for a general theory of event structure. He looks at how the framework may be applied to causation, argument linking, and the modelling of polysemy. He examines the semantic similarities and differences between listen- and hear-class verbs, and analyses the cognate patterns of sound-class verbs. He concludes by drawing together his findings and exploring their implications for linguistic theory. Clearly and readably written, with each point of the argument illustrated with well-chosen examples, this book will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions at graduate level and above.

In Ten Lectures on Event Structure in a Network Theory of Language, Nikolas Gisborne offers an account of verb meaning from the perspective of a model that treats language structure as part of the wider cognitive network.

This volume aims to contribute to the theory of metaphor from the viewpoint of Chinese, in order to help place the theory into a wider cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. It focuses on metaphors of emotion, the "time as space" metaphor and the Event Structure Metaphor.

Are human emotions best characterized as biological, psychological, or cultural entities? Many researchers claim that emotions arise either from human biology (i.e., biological reductionism) or as products of culture (i.e., social constructionism). This book challenges this simplistic division between the body and culture by showing how human emotions are to a large extent "constructed" from individuals' embodied experiences in different cultural settings. The view proposed here demonstrates how cultural aspects of emotions, metaphorical language about the emotions, and human physiology in emotion are all part of an intergrated system and shows how this system points to the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory views of biological reductionism and social constructionism in contemporary debates about human emotion.