Aspect shift in stative verbs and their arguments

Abstract

This paper offers an alternative explanation for coercion effects or ‘aspect shift’ with stative verbs in combination with the progressive or the aspectually specific and distinct Spanish past tenses. The account follows Rodriguez (2007) in exploiting lexical ambiguities to provide a richer set of VP Aktionsarten via normal compositional semantics. Crucially it is the addition of aspectually specific morphology that functions to filter out those VP interpretations which have incompatible Aktionsarten. The purported shifting effect therefore derives from one or another VP meaning (potentially including alternating NP denotations as well) in association with corresponding morphology via aspectual compatibility. The analysis provides a natural means for explaining why certain cases of ‘aspect shift’ do not occur, namely on the basis of the lack of the underlying semantic potentials of the words involved. The proposal investigates three cases in depth, with implied applicability to a broader range of examples.