5.1 Event Structure and Aspect

As we have seen in chapter 1, the traditional idea that verbs are ‘doing words’, inasmuch as what they refer to is actions, is not very accurate. Some verbs refer to emotions or states of mind in which nothing can really be said to be done:

Yet obviously these verbs have meaning and they can be said to refer to something. Let us call what it is that a verb describes in a sentence an event and this can either be an action, a state or whatever.

Some events described by a verb are simple, consisting of a single part. For example:

In each of these sentences there is a single event consisting of the state of some element or the relationship between two elements. In (2a), for example, the plane has achieved a state in which it can be said to be located in some place, i.e. at Heathrow.

Other verbs describe a more complex event:

In (3a) an event is described which includes the event described in (2c) but also involves the wind doing something that results in this. We might see this as a series of ‘sub-events’ connected in one way or another to make up a complex event. Thus, one event involves the wind doing something involving the rock (blowing at it or something) and the other event involves the rock being in a state of erosion. Moreover, the first event has a causal relationship with the second. We might represent this situation thus:

Here, e represents the complex event associated with the sentence the wind eroded the rock and the equals sign indicates that this is constituted of a series of other events, in this case e₁ and e₂. The first of these is the event involving the wind’s action and the second is the event of the rock being in the state of erosion. The arrow between the two indicates the causal relationship between the two sub-events in that e₁ causes e₂.

The events described in (3b) and (c) are even more complex. In (3b) we have Peter doing something to the eggs which causes the eggs to undergo a process of movement which results in them being situated in a location (in the bowl):

In this, e₁ represents the action of Peter, e₂ the movement of the eggs and e₃ the state achieved by the eggs of being located in the bowl. Note that e₁ results in e₂ and e₂ results in e₃ as represented by the arrows. (3c) has a similar event structure involving Gus doing something that causes the sandwich to undergo a process the end result of which is that it ends up in Sam’s possession. Thus, e₁ is Gus’s action, e₂ is the process of movement or ‘change of ownership’ that the sandwich undergoes and e₃ is the state achieved by the sandwich of being possessed by Sam.

Just like thematic structure, we will demonstrate below that event structure also has an effect on the syntactic organisation of elements within the VP. The main claim is that there is an isomorphism between event structure and the structure of the VP, so that just as a complex event may be broken up into a series of sub-events, then the VP also breaks up into ‘sub-VPs’ in a one-to-one correspondence with the sub-events. This will become clearer as we progress.

Turning now to aspect. Again this is a semantic property of verbs which has to do with the process involved and its relationship to the progression of time. This is not tense, however, which situates an event at a particular place in time with respect to some other point, the time at which a sentence is uttered, for example. With aspect time is important with respect to the internal aspects of the event itself. For example, the end point of the event seen with respect to its starting point and what goes on between the two. It is important to distinguish between two types of aspect, one which is internal to the meaning of the verb, which we might refer to as lexical aspect, and one which is to do with the interpretation of a particular event described by a sentence, which we call grammatical aspect. Lexical aspect is also sometimes called aktionsart.

With lexical aspect we can distinguish between those verbs which describe events which have a natural end point and those which do not. Consider the difference between eat and sit. Eating involves a process which if it continues long enough must come to a natural end determined by the extent of the thing being eaten: one can only eat an apple until it is all gone! Sitting, on the other hand, can continue indefinitely and will only come to an end when something else happens to stop it, the person stands up or the chair breaks, for example. By contrast, grammatical aspect looks at end points of an event from the perspective of the situation being described. Compare:

In (6a) the situation described involves the Queen of England being on the chair when the sentence is uttered. The sitting event started at some point before the utterance and continued for some undetermined time after it. In (6b), the Queen of England is no longer on the chair when the sentence is uttered – she has stopped sitting and has gone somewhere else. Thus the sitting event is complete. Note that in (6a) the auxiliary verb be is used in conjunction with the ing form of the verb and in contrast (6b) involves the auxiliary have with the ‘en’ form of the verb (irregularly expressed as sat in this case).

Although the encoding of grammatical aspect in English is complex, the forms be + Ving and have + Ven are often called the progressive and perfective forms to reflect the kind of distinction made in (6). That things are not so simple, however, can be seen from the following:

Although (7a) has the verb in its progressive form, the event described is clearly completed and the person has stopped living in Paris. (7b) on the other hand is in the perfective form, but the event is not complete: the person is still living in Paris at the time the sentence is uttered.

While this is a very interesting and complex part of the description of the semantics of English verbal complexes, we will not have very much to say about it in this book, as we are mainly interested in syntax and in semantics only inasmuch as it has an effect on the syntactic organisation of an expression. For us, the main interest in grammatical aspect is to do with the appearance of the auxiliary verbs and their syntactic distributions and properties.

Having introduced these notions, we can now turn to the analysis of English verbs and the constructions we find them in.