http:\/\/iconicphotos.wordpress.com\/2010\/01\/11\/nikita-khrushchev-and-his-shoe\/<\/a><\/p>\nThe discussion there and in Taubman's footnote of the events at the UN General Assembly on October 13, 1960 makes it clear that on the one hand, Khrushchev's banging his shoe on the desk became famous and iconic, and that on the other hand, there is a real dispute about whether it actually happened. That seems to be one circumstance in which something not happening can be described as an event.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
An even more common way is when there is a high expectation of something happening and then it doesn't, as in this example from Larry Horn's book, A Natural History of Negation<\/em> (1989): \"What happened next was that the consulate didn't give us our visa.\" As Larry notes, \"didn't give us\" could well be replaced by \"held up\" or \"denied\", \"converging to suggest that a negative predicate can be functionally equivalent to a (morphological) positive in denoting a simple event.\" (Horn, p.55)<\/p>\nAnd around the water cooler Larry added these nice notes:<\/p>\n
Having professionally worried about, and not solved, the problem of negative events myself (in the first chapter of my book), I've been attuned to similar cases and I've noticed one particular species of negative event that's become a trope in country music. \u00a0Here's one version from a Hank Cochran song popularized by George Jones:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Well, tonight when you lay lonely in your king size bed
\nWith a hunger inside you can feel
\nWill, I'll be the empty place laying next to you
\nAnd when your phone don't ring it'll be me
\n<\/strong>
\nIt'll be me not calling you, crying like I used to do<\/span>
\nA-crawlin' on my hands and knees
\nIt'll be me not on the phone, begging let me come back home
\nAnd when your phone don't ring, it'll be me.<\/span><\/p>\nWell, tonight it'll be my car not in your driveway
\nAnd you'll wonder where on earth I could be
\nIt'll be my footsteps you don't hear in the hallway
\nAnd when your phone don't ring, it'll be me.<\/span><\/p>\nIt'll be me not calling you, crying like I used to do <\/span>
\nCrawlin' on my hands and knees
\nIt'll be me not on the phone, a-begging let me come back home
\nAnd when your phone don't ring, it'll be me.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n==================<\/p>\n
Here are a couple more versions:<\/p>\n
I put another tank of gas in my Chevrolet
\nand I paid off all the bills that I had to pay
\nI don't wanna hang around can't you see
\nif the phone don't ring, you know it's me<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n[Gordon Cormier]<\/p>\n
==================<\/p>\n
It's too bad we can't turn<\/span><\/p>\nAnd live in the past<\/span><\/p>\nIf the phone doesn't ring<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nIt's me<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n[Jimmy Buffett]<\/p>\n
=================<\/p>\n
So you just go where you go
\nAnd do what you do
\nAnd be who you want to be
\nBut when she burns you again
\nAnd your phone doesn't ring
\nBaby it's me<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n[Mary Chapin Carpenter]<\/p>\n
I'm sure there are others, but I don't of any that refer to not hearing the phone not ring. \u00a0(I tried without success to check whether anyone had reported witnessing Babe Ruth not call his shot in the World Series.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So what does it take to be an event? Events are generally distinguished from states and processes. Events take time – maybe just an instant (the light turned green), maybe an interval (John built a house); event descriptions usually combine well with adverbs of frequency, location, reason, etc; events but not states or processes combine with \"What happened was … .\"\u00a0 Larry Horn's first chapter, mentioned above, recounts debates going back to the ancient Greeks about whether a negative sentence can even count as a description of a real state of affairs (since there are no \"negative states of affairs\"), and concludes that although the ontological issues remain unsettled, it seems that in ordinary language we really do talk as if there are indeed negative events. (Emmon Bach coined the nice phrase \"Natural Language Metaphysics\" to distinguish linguists' concerns from philosophers'. Metaphysics is concerned with what there is; Natural Language Metaphysics is concerned with what we talk as if there is. — I'm paraphrasing from memory from Bach (1986) \"Natural language metaphysics\".)<\/p>\n
Lakoff in his 1965 thesis claimed that adverbs of location, frequency, and instrument never modify negated sentences, because \"one cannot assert the location (frequency, etc.) of an event that does not occur.\" But Stockwell, Schachter, and Partee in The Major Syntactic Structures of English<\/em> (1973) argued that \"there are certain cases where the negation of an event may, loosely speaking, itself be an event, e.g. not paying taxes, not getting up early, not going to church, not eating dinner …<\/em> (semantically, the \"event\" seems to be the breaking of a habitual or expected pattern of activity.)\" (pp. 250-1). They suggest that in the following examples, the locative or frequency adverb modifies the whole negated sentence:<\/p>\ni. I don't get up early at home.<\/p>\n
ii. He sometimes doesn't eat dinner.<\/p>\n
iii. He doesn't eat dinner two nights a week.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And Klima's classic 1964 paper \"Negation in English\" includes examples of well-formed double negations, where the inner one phrase seems to describe a \"negative event\" type:<\/p>\n
iv. He hasn't often not paid taxes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
James Higginbotham in his 1983 paper \"The logic of perceptual reports: An extensional alternative to situation semantics\", argues that in sentences of the form \"I saw John run\", where a perception verb is followed by a subject and a tenseless verb phrase, the \"John run\" part denotes an event, and the whole sentence reports the perception of an event (as opposed to \"I saw that such-and-such\", where the object is a proposition and the sentence reports seeing some evidence that verifies the proposition.) And he noted in that paper that such event-denoting NP VP complements could sometimes occur with not<\/em> attached to the VP, but he regards that negation as something other than ordinary sentential negation. He argues that \"John saw Mary not leave\" means that he saw her stay; that \"John saw Mary not smoke\" means that he saw her refrain from smoking. And the analysis of this \"inner\" or \"narrow-scope\" negation has indeed been a big part of the puzzle, from Klima through Stockwell et al up through Horn and the present. But Higginbotham does treat \"Mary not leave\", \"Mary not smoke\", and by extension \"Khrushchev not bang his shoe\" as denoting events, and I think all linguists now concur. But they are puzzling kinds of event sentences, and we may still smile and scratch our heads when we come across one in the wild.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I just found that sentence in the first footnote to William Taubman's \"Khrushchev: The Man and his Era\" (2003). It's a great example of a \"negative event\" – we call them \"negative events\" with scare quotes because it remains controversial whether there are any such things. How can not doing something be an event? First […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[174,55,175,19,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-logic","category-negation","category-philosophy-of-language","category-semantics","category-syntax"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3995\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}