We are happy to announce a talk by Max Berthold (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.

The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.

Title: On Eventive Nouns

Date: July 7

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct

Abstract:

Nominals contribute temporal information to the utterance. This information may or may not be independent from the verbal predication time denoted by the matrix verb with which the nominal appears. Available theories in semantic literature establish the parameters that govern the nominal predication time: the type of determiner, the tense on the verb, or the context. While this covers most of the empirical landscape, there are examples that have been unaccounted for. In this talk, I will advocate for an extension to the existing theories which aims to capture the lexical temporal properties of nouns. I will argue that nouns separate into two classes: eventive and state nouns. Eventive nouns are characterized by having a hidden event argument that can be anaphoric to contextually supplied events. This allows us to explain the previously puzzling examples in the literature, and suggests more parallels between the nominal and verbal domains than originally assumed.