<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="J98-3003">
  <Title>A Generative Perspective on Verb Alternations</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="403" end_page="403" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
SITUATION
STATE ACTIVITY /\
PROTRACTED- MOMENT.-
ACTIVITY ACTIVITY
Figure 1
EVENT
CULMINATION TRANSITION
PROTRACTED- MOMENT.-
CULMINATION CULMINATION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Situation types in the ontology of MOOSE.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> States are seen much in the same way as Bach sees them: Something is attributed to an object for some period of time, and the object is not perceived as &amp;quot;doing&amp;quot; anything. The bottle is empty is true for the bottle without it doing anything about it. We do not make further distinctions among states here.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Activities were called &amp;quot;processes&amp;quot; by Bach, but we need this term on a different level of description (see below). They are quite similar to states, but there is always something &amp;quot;going on,&amp;quot; as in The water wasflowing toward the sea. We distinguish two sub-types here: protracted activities take place over an extended period of time, whereas momentaneous activities occur in an instant; a &amp;quot;point adverbial&amp;quot; such as at noon serves as a linguistic test.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Events are occurrences that have a structure to them; in particular, their result, or their coming to an end is included in them: to destroy a building, to write a book. As their central feature we take them to always involve some change of state: the building loses its integrity, the book comes into existence, or gets finished. While Bach (1986) did not investigate the internal structure of events, others suggested that this needs to be done (e.g., Moens and Steedman 1988; Parsons 1990). Pustejovsky (1991) treated Vendlerian accomplishments and achievements as transitions from a state Q(y) to NOT-Q(y), and suggested that accomplishments in addition have an intrinsic agent performing an activity that brings about the change of state.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We follow this line, but modify it in some ways. Basically, we see any event as involving a change of state; an activity responsible for the change can optionally be present. A plain transition is necessarily momentaneous (The room lit up), whereas a transition-with-activity inherits its protracted/momentaneous feature from the embedded activity. We call these tripartite events culminations. 2 They are composed of a pre-state (holding before the event commences), a post-state (holding when the event is over), and an optional activity that brings the transition about. Generalizing from Pustejovsky's proposal, we take state transitions to be more than merely oppositions of Q(y) and NOT-Q(y); they can also amount to a gradual change on some scale, or involve other values. Also in contrast to Pustejovsky, we do not regard the presence of a volitional agent as responsible for any of the category distinctions; rather, the agentivity feature cuts across the categories discussed. Other aspects of our ontology are designed following proposals by Jackendoff (1990), in particular his analysis of movement events.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>