MODELING OF SITUATIONS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (BY THE SITUATION WITH A SEMANTIC COMPONENT OF “SATURATION”)

Abstract

The traditional semantic analysis is based on a commonsense ontology of the types of phenomena found in the world: things, properties, actions, etc. This commonsense ontology is a controversial issue in linguistic as well as philosophical semantics, where neither surface verbs nor adjectives denote individual entities. More recently, philosophers argued that verbs, at least action verbs, must be allowed to refer to events and the theory of situation semantics actually encourages one to speak of different ontological types such as actions and properties. Linguistic structure is sensitive not only to the “objective” character of a situation, as represented more or less by the lexical semantics of a root, but also to the way the speaker conceptualizes or perceives the situation. This can be called the conceptualization of a situation, a view of linguistic structure propounded by Fillmore, Lakoff, Talmy, Langacker and others.