Temporal Modification of Event Kinds

As the counterpart to kinds of entities or objects [5], event kinds are used to account for a variety of linguistic facts in the event domain. The modification of event kinds is usually considered to be restricted, and temporal modifiers are claimed to be hardly acceptable [18]. In this paper I focus on verbal gerunds in English, which have been analyzed as event kind descriptions [15], and demonstrate that they accept temporal modification but remain kind-referring. I extend the analysis of frequency adjectives [13] to interpret both temporal and frequency modifiers in verbal gerunds, showing that the modification of event kinds is less restricted than commonly assumed.