Miriam Butt, University of Konstanz
In this talk I take a further look at the "Aspectual complex predicates" in Urdu/Hindi as described in Butt 1995 and try to account for the differences between light verbs like paR `fall' and le `take' on the one hand, and verbs like lag `begin' on the other. I suggest that the distinction can be understood if one views the light verbs as "event modificatory" and the lag `begin' as "event embedding". That is, the light verbs do not introduce events of their own, but serve to focus the points of inception and completion of the main verb's event. On the other hand, the effect of verbs like lag `begin' is to take an event and embed it under a beginning event. In order to model this contrast, a distinct separation between the notions of an internal event structure that may be modified, and the placement of the event within a larger situation is needed. Taking Smith's (1991) proposals for Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) as a point of departure, I incorporate distinct representations of internal and external event structure.