Path Predicates

This chapter explores the connection among the various types of predicates that can describe sequential change, such as advance, cool, march, and flash. The examination is conducted within a theory of the lexicon-syntax relation, in which the meanings of verbs are decomposed into atomic meaning components, each of which is free to project syntactic structure. There are three possible projected predicate types, each having a particular aspectual interpretation. The combination of the projected structure and its interpretation, and a requirement of the interpretation of all verbal components, allows the various predicate meanings to be derived from a verb's single lexical representation. Within this framework, the incremental and iterating change predicate types are all analysed as path - or plural - predicates, and their particular syntactic and aspectual properties are accounted for.