Dependent Event Types

• Event: Seminar
• Lecturer: Zhaohui Luo
• Date: 05 December 2018
• Duration: 2 hours
• Venue: Gothenburg

This talk studies how dependent types can be employed for a refined treatment of event types, offering a nice improvement to Davidson’s event semantics. We consider dependent event types indexed by thematic roles (DETs) and illustrate how, in the presence of refined event types, subtyping plays an essential role in semantic interpretations.

Two applications of DETs are studied. The first shows that DETs give a natural solution to an incompatibility problem (sometimes called event quantification problem) in combining event semantics with the traditional compositional semantics. The second concerns selectional restriction: it is shown that DETs offer flexible but nice treatments of selectional restriction in the MTT-semantic setting with events.