Relating ontological knowledge and internal structure of eventity concepts

Abstract

This paper addresses the role ontological knowledge plays in the conceptualization of 'eventities' (events and similar entities, cf. Zaefferer 2002), of entities that are typically encoded by verbs in natural languages. We will approach this issue by asking which meaning components are needed for detailed decompositional representations of verbal semantics and how these components can be combined with one another. Decompositional representations of verbal semantics (and hence of eventities) depict, besides specific content information, the internal structure of eventity concepts. Accordingly, representations comprise components that convey underlying structural information - in addition to expressing content information. Such structural information includes, for instance, components that represent statal structure and those that represent activity structure.