Research in lexical semantics, logical semantics, and syntax has converged on a growing recognition that the grammars of natural languages structure and refer to events in particular ways. Lexical semanticists who have studied how verb meanings are organized across languages, have observed recurrent patterns in how verbs encode time, causation, stativity, and other characteristics of events. Logical semanticists who have studied the truth-conditional properties of sentence meaning, have also found it necessary to refer to elements of meaning related to the semantics of events, such as causation and temporal properties. Syntacticians, studying the general structure of sentences of human languages, have discovered a growing body of phenomena in which the semantics of events can be seen to interact with syntactic structures. These three disciplines are concerned with different tools, approaches, and questions, but there is now enough convergence on the idea of events as grammatical objects in both syntax and semantics, that dialogue and cooperative research across these disciplines is possible. This is a workshop on Events as Grammatical Objects, from the combined perspectives of syntax, lexical semantics, and logical semantics. This workshop brings together eminent researchers from these three areas specifically to address this issue. A workshop is an excellent way to spark this interaction, that otherwise would occur only sporadically if at all. This kind of meeting has not been attempted before. This workshop is exceedingly cost-effective for a number of reasons. The workshop will be held at the Linguistic Society of America's 1997 Summer Institute at Cornell University, where some of the participants in the workshop will be teaching courses, reducing travel expenditures. A number of courses relating to topics on the syntax or semantics of events are planned for the 1997 Institute, and other scholars working on events will be able to participate as part of the audience, i ncreasing the opportunities for productive dialogue on these topics. Finally, cross-fertilization and joint research will multiply the effective power of these researchers to attack the questions that could lead to an integrated theory of events in natural language.
