About the primitives of aspect across languages

Abstract

This introduction presents the matter that this Topic/Comment issue addresses—namely, the encoding of aspectual information in the syntax and morphology. The main aim of this issue is to shed light on the identification of the semantic primitives underlying the most prominent viewpoint aspectual forms referred to in the literature (e.g., Imperfect, Perfective, Perfect, and Neutral), and to give a principled explanation of the way in which these semantic primitives are represented in the syntax and mapped onto the morphology. The introduction surveys and compares the different proposals that the authors in the issue defend in this regard and discusses the need of finer grained analyses so that more accurate crosslinguistic correspondences, which are crucial for answering questions in realms such as that of second language acquisition, can be established.