Aspectual Interpretation Research Articles

La préposition : un «auxiliaire» du nom ?

Danielle Leeman evokes the resemblance existing between the preposition's fonction with respect to the noun on the one hand, and some tenses with respect to the verb, on the other hand. She rejects, like many others, the partition between lexical and grammatical items and offers to elaborate a hypothesis regarding the meaning of these forms. She presents different categories of nouns and examines their compatibility with the preposition dans. Leeman further demonstrates that dans is susceptible to forming both temporal and causal complements. She concludes that whatever the noun category introduced by dans is, the preposition presents the event as a whole. Leeman supports the hypothesis that the preposition establishes a certain aspectual feature of the noun, in the same way as the auxiliary establishes an aspectual interpretation of the verb.

Bulgarian preverbs: aspect in phrase structure

This paper argues for a syntactic approach to aspectuality, where semantic information about subevent structure is incorporated into the phrase marker. Such an approach would be justified only if aspectual properties present syntactic as well as semantic effects. It is the aim of the paper to present evidence of such syntactic effects. Slavic preverbs have standardly been regarded as perfectivizing (or telicity-marking) morphemes. It will be argued that preverbs are also causative morphemes. As such, they are situated in the upper part of a VP-layer structure, a light verb widely accepted to be reserved for CAUSE. In English, the aspectual interpretation of a terminative or durative event depends on the specified or unspecified cardinality of the object (Verkuyl 1993) and aspect is calculated in a functional projection AspP between the two VP layers (Travis 1991). In Slavic, on the other hand, it is the presence or absence of a preverb in the upper verbal head that encodes a terminative or a durative interpretation. This contrast is explained with the relatively higher structural position of Slavic preverbs with respect to the functional projection AspP in English. Similar scope effects are demonstrated with articles in Russian, with interpretations of Polish and English imperfective sentences, and with manner adverbs in Bulgarian

Verbal Nouns and Event Structure in Scottish Gaelic

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A Theory of Aspectual Choice

Sentential aspect presents a situation (event, state etc.) from a particular point of view: it represents the speaker's choice of perspective on the situation. In this article, a speakerbased approach to aspect is proposed which crucially invokes abstraction, namely the idealization of different types of situations. A speaker relates an actual situation to an idealized type by using the linguistic forms associated with that type. Speakers may choose an unusual way of presenting a situation, as with a progressive stative such as I'm really loving this walk. Here a state is presented as an event. Analysis of stative sentences in English shows that they have a unique aspectual interpretation, and allows for the interpretation of progressive statives. Two components of sentential aspect are recognized. SITUATION ASPECT involves type of situation, e.g. event or state; VIEWPOINT ASPECT involves type of perspective, e.g. simple or progressive. Separating these two components leads to a unified account of simple aspect in English.*