rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport) (11/30/88)
UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
GRADUATE GROUP IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
PRESENTS
ALEXANDER NAKHIMOVSKY
Department of Computer Science
Colgate University
GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES AND SHAPES OF EVENTS
Tuesday, December 13, 1988
4:30 P.M.
280 Park Hall, Amherst Campus
This talk traces recurrent patterns in two linguistic and two ontologi-
cal domains: (1) grammatical categories of the noun, (2) grammatical
categories of the verb, (3) shapes of visually perceived objects, and
(4) aspectual classes of events. Correspondences between noun
categories and visual properties of objects are shown by comparing the
semantics of noun classifiers in classifier languages with some computa-
tional objects and processes of early and late vision.
Among grammatical categories of the verb, only those having to do with
aspect are discussed, and three kinds of phenomena identified: the
perfective-imperfective distinction, corresponding to the presence vs.
absence of a contour, at a given scale, in the object domain (and thus
to the count-mass distinction in the noun-categories domain); the aspec-
tual types of verb meanings (a.k.a. Aktionsarten); and coersion, or
nesting, of aspectual types. Unlike previous treatments, a distinction
is drawn betweem aspectual coersion within the word (i.e., in word for-
mation and inflection) and aspectual coersion above the word level, by
verb arguments and adverbial modifiers. This makes it possible to
define the notion of an aspectual classifier and (on analogy with noun-
classifier languages) the notion of an aspectual language. Several pro-
perties of aspectual languages are identified, and a comparison is made
between the ways aspectual distinctions are expressed in aspectual
languages (e.g., Slavic languages), predominantly nominal languages
(e.g., Finnish, Hungarian), and a weakly typed language like English.
The similarities between the object-noun domains and the event-verb
domains point to a need for topological (rather than logical) represen-
tations for aspectual classes, representations that could support the
notions of connectedness, boundary, and continuous function. One such
representation is presented and shown to explain several facts about
aspectual classes. Tentative proposals are made toward defining the
notion of an ``aspectually possible word''. In conclusion, I discuss
the implications of the presented material for the problem of naturalis-
tic explanation in linguistics and the modularity hypothesis.
There will be an evening discussion at Stuart Shapiro's house,
112 Park Ledge Drive, Snyder, at 8:15 P.M.
Contact Bill Rapaport, Dept. of Computer Science, 673-3193, for further details.