Lexical Representations, Event Structure and Quantification

In this paper, we discuss the relation intervening between distributivity and the participants in an event. We argue that there is a strict dependency between aspectual features and the quantificational properties of each participantsin a given situation; we also argue for a distinction of events in terms of their polyadicity, or their number of arguments. In more general terms, we propose a principled way to deal with the problem of representing the structure of events and their relation with the situation and the participants in that situation. At first we introduce a "static" description of predicates as conceptual representations in a computational lexicon, where event structure is expressed in terms of a combination of time “t” and event “e” which may assume a variable or a constant value according to aspectual class and to the number and type of arguments of the predicate. We hypothesize internal quantification on the event-time only whenever a variable is associated with “t”, and external quantification on the number of events only when a variable is associated with “e” in the static description. Then we deal with “dynamic” quantificational properties of events which derive from syntactic and semantic properties of the utterance or situation in which they are contextualized. In this case we propose two main notions Global and Internal that apply to event structure and establish a point of view by means of which to decide whether temporal interpretation affects the overall event, or only portions of it; the two notions are also related to factuality of the event, and to its perfectivity. Finally, we discusse the introduction of a function that relates participants in the event according to their quantificational nature and the event structure itself. With respect to the subdivision of quantification into distributive and collective operators, we establish a mapping from participants into the event inward, and outward.