The Role of Event Expression in Grammar

The main thesis of this article is that "event" is an important cognitive category which plays a central role in the semantics of natural languages. It will be shown that apparently unrelated data fall into place as soon as the role of event expressions and the existence of events as a semantic category are recognized. Attention should be drawn to the fact that in current work in Generative Grammar there is considerable disagreement as to the nature of certain syntactic/semantic constructions. A major controversy is between groups claiming that subjects and predicates should be represented as clauses on all levels of grammar (except perhaps PF) and groups claiming that various semantically clause-like structures should not be represented as clauses at all. It is far beyond the scope of this article to investigate even a substantial part of the existing proposals. 1 My goal is rather to discuss some striking similarities between undoubtedly clausal constructions (finite) and bare infinitive constructions ("accusativus cum infinitivo") which, I hope, shed some new light on some of the existing theoretical accounts. My involvement in the syntax controversy will, however with the exception of section 7 be rather indirect. The reason for that is that I will often have to say more about the semantics of the critical data than about their formal syntactic characteristics. We