Sentece semantics one: Situations

Sentece semantics one: Situations

1. Classifying situation

   • Situation type
     • Label for the typology of situations encoded in the semantics of a language.
     • Stative verbs
     • Dynamic verbs
       • Durative
         • It’s applied to verbs which describe a situation or process which lasts for a period of time. John sle
       • Punctual
         • Describes an event that seems so instantaneous that it involves virtually no time.
       • Telic
         • Refers to whose processes which are seen as having a natural completion.
       • Atelic
         • It has an implied boundary when the process will be over.
     • Dynamic situaations
       • Events
         • The speaker views the situation as a whole.
       • Processes
         • We view, as it were, the internal structure of a dynamic situation.
   • Tense
     • Allows a speaker to locate a situation relative to some reference point in time and most likely the time of speaking.
   • Aspect
     • Allows speakers to view an event in various ways: as complete, or incomplete, as so short as to involve almost repeated over a period.

2. Comparing aspect across languages

   • Perfective
     • Viewing a situation externally, from outside, with no reference to its internal temporal structure.
     • Includes the viewing of the beginning and the end of a situation
   • Imperfective
     • Allows the viewing of a situation from within making explicit reference to the internal temporal structure.
     • Focuses on the middle phase, leaving especially the end unspecified

3. Pluperfect

   • The speaker can locate an event in the past or future and use that event as the reference point for its own past, present and future.

4. Deictic

   • Are the ways in which a speaker relates references to space and time to the ‘here and now’ utterance