Aspectual Coercion and Logical Polysemy - Journal of Semantics

140 Aspectual Coercion and Logical Polysemy
predicates. We also demonstrate why commencer and finir (finish) allow coercion
while cesser (cease) and arreter (stop) do not.
4 THE RELEVANCE OF EVENT STRUCTURE
In order to understand better the behavior of aspectual coercion, we review our
assumptions regarding the structure of events as encoded by lexical items. We
begin with the uncontroversial assumption that events can be subclassified into
at least three sorts: processes, states, and transitions. Furthermore, we assume,
following Pustejovsky (1991b), a subeventual structure to these event sorts as
well. This has the advantage of allowing principles of predicate-argument
binding to refer to subevents in the semantic representation, a move which has
significant theoretical consequences (cf. Moens & Steedman 1988; Grimshaw
1990; Pustejovsky 1991b; and Moens 1987). Evidence from unaccusativity,
aspectual predicates, and the varied nature of causative constructions show,
however, that even this notion of event structure does not fully explain the
underlying behavior of semantic projection to argument positions in the
syntax. We will adopt an event structure analysis employing the notion of
headedness in order to account for the richer range of syntactic behavior.
In Pustejovsky & Busa (1994), the event constructions first introduced in
Kamp (1980) and van Benthem (1983) are extended to a model called an
'extended event structure' in order to represent the relation between an event
and its proper subevents. An extended event structure is a tuple,