Thefive functions listed so far (BE,STAY,GO,EXT,andORIENT) are major members of a family of“core functions”
around whichsituations(Statesand Events)are organized. Anotherfamilyconstitutes“aspectual functions.”Themost
prominent of these is Inchoative,INCH(X), a one-place functionwhose argument is a State; it denotes an Event of this
state coming about. For instance, the relation between the adjectiveopen 1 and the intransitive verbopen 2 (examples (6a,
b)) is thatopen 2 conceptualizes the coming about (INCH) of the state of beingopen 1. A sort of converse ofINCHis the
Perfective,PERF(X), a functionwhoseargumentis an Event,and whichdenotestheStateofthat Eventbeing complete.
It is seen most clearly as the perfect tense in sentences likeSue has eaten lunch—roughly,‘Sue is presently in the state of
havingcompleted eatinglunch.’WewillseemoreformallyhowINCHcombineswiththecorefunctionsina moment.^188
A third family of functions is the causative family, which includesCAUSE,LET, andHELPin various Eventive and
Stative versions, againrelativized tosemanticfield.CAUSEhas twoobligatory arguments, theAgentand theEffect, and
an optional argument, the Patient. (21) makes these options clearer.
(21) a.The wind made it rain.
CAUSE (WIND, [EventIT-RAIN])
Agent Effect
‘the wind caused the event of its raining’
b. The wind made me fall down.
CAUSE (WIND, ME, [EventI FALL DOWN])
Agent Patient Effect
‘the wind, acting on me, caused the event of my falling down’My intuition is that the three-argument version (21b) is preferred when possible; but in the absence of an identifiable
Patient on which the Agent can act, the two-argument version (21a) is a fallback,LETworks the same way;HELPhas
only the three-argument version. These three functions are related by features in a fashion sketched in section 11.2.
Readers more familiar with standard formal semantics may recognize in
LEXICAL SEMANTICS 363
(^188) An important result of Jackendoff (1991) is thatINCHandTO have identical further decom-positions, except that one pertains to situations and one to space: they both
denote a one-dimensional directed entity end-bounded by their argument. This leads to a quark-like feature decomposition of the ontological categories, as suggested in
section 11.1. Jackendoff (1996c) shows how this common decomposition contributes to the computation of aspectuality of a sentence.