Abstract:

Based on the theory of events proposed by American philosopher and logician Donald Davidson in 1967, event semantics has made the most achievements in the study of events and the internal time structure of events, and it has gradually developed into the theory with the most extensive influence in logical semantics. It uses first-order logic and formal symbols and computations to describe natural language, and it has become the forefront of linguistic research. Unfortunately, up until now, there have been no international textbooks on event semantics. An Introduction to Event Semantics, written by Chinese scholars Wu Ping and Hao Xiangli and published by Intellectual Property Publishing House in December 2017, gathers the essence of this theory in one volume and was presented to readers on the 50th anniversary of Davidson’s event theory, which is a matter of great significance. The book covers the historical evolution and analytical methods and core research results of event semantics, and it is a useful guide for Chinese scholars in the fields of linguistics, logic, and natural language processing to understand event semantics. This paper summarizes the main content of the book while also making brief comments on its structure and content.

Keywords: event semantics; logical semantics; event argument; natural language processing

摘要：

事件语义学基于美国哲学家、逻辑学家戴维森于1967年提出的事件论元思想,以一阶逻辑、形式符号和计算来描述自然语言,主要解决事件和事件的内部时间结构等问题,并逐渐发展成为逻辑语义学中影响力最为广泛的理论之一,理论成果丰硕。但遗憾的是,目前国际上还没有事件语义学的教科书。由中国学者吴平和郝向丽所著,2017年12月知识产权出版社出版的《事件语义学引论》将这一理论最精华的成果集结于一册,在戴维森提出事件论元思想50周年之际呈现给读者,具有重要的学术意义。该书涵盖事件语义学的历史沿革、分析方法以及核心研究成果,是语言学、逻辑学、自然语言处理领域的学者了解事件语义学的有益途径。本文概述了该书的主要内容并对其结构和内容作了简评。

关键词: 事件语义学, 逻辑语义学, 事件论元, 自然语言处理