1. Lexicalized meaning and the internal temporal structure of events (original) (raw)
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Lexicalized meaning and the internal temporal structure of events
as a classification of verbs, and offers a different classification for the elements of lexicalized meaning which determine the aspectual potential of verbs. It highlights the importance of a class of verbs with a lexically encoded scale, illustrating that a large class of scalar verbs cannot be classified once and for all either as activities, accomplishments or achievements, though the lexically encoded scale accounts for most of the aspectual behavior of these verbs. The aspectual and syntactic significance of a lexicalized scale is explored. The class of verbs lexicalizing a scale is shown not to be the same as the class of verbs selecting an incremental theme. This is justified both on semantic grounds and on syntactic grounds. There appears to be more justification for recognizing the four-way Vendler classification at the VP level, though it is demonstrated that accomplishments do not have a uniform internal temporal structure, predominantly because of the variety of sources of incremental structure. 1. Background Most current studies of aspect assume the existence of the four Vendler classes: states, activities, achievements and accomplishments. Despite the fact that other classifications have been offered, (for example, those in Mourelatos 1978, Bach 1981, and Carlson 1981) none has achieved the status of the Vendler classification. Often, linguists take these classes to be a linguistic fact, and then attempt to come up with theories which explain their existence and their properties, usually by offering basic elements of meaning and modes of composition that together produce just these four aspectual classes. One question which arises in the context of this enterprise is what aspectual classes are classes of. While the title of Vendler's (1957) paper (" Verbs and Times ") leads one to assume that that Vendler was classifying verbs, he seemed to have been aware 1 Malka Rappaport Hovav that he was really classifying larger linguistic units. The properties which define the Vendler classes are dynamicity, duration and telicity, at least some of which are not determined once and for all at the lexical level, but, rather, at the VP level, as a result of aspectual composition (Dowty 1979, Krifka 1992, 1998, Verkuyl 1989, among others). Thus, one dominant class of approaches assumes that the Vendler classes are classes of event-denoting predicates corresponding to the VP. 1 But this returns us to the question of the relationship between the meaning of a verb and the aspectual class of the VP it appears in. Another way of phrasing this question would be: do verbs themselves have inherent aspectual properties which determine the classification of the VPs they appear in? There must be some such lexical difference to explain why the nature of the direct object of verbs like eat and draw affects the classification of the VP (eat apples vs. eat five apples; draw a picture vs. draw pictures), while the direct object of verbs like push and tickle does not (push a cart vs. push carts; tickle the child vs. tickle children). Vendler (1957) describes the classes in terms of time schemata, and the criteria for his classification mostly have to do with internal temporal properties which interact with time-related diagnostics. The diagnostics for the Vendler classes include appearance and interpretation in the progressive, entailments from the progressive to the perfect, compatibility and interpretation with the variety of temporal adverbials. The question of the relation between these time schemata and the elements of meaning lexicalized in the verbs is not raised by Vendler. Dowty (1979: chapter 2) attempts to relate word meaning to aspectual classes by using lexical decompositions to represent the different aspectual classes. The decompositions are meant to capture certain regularities ; for example, that particular verbs are often used in both activities and accomplishments (e.g., walk/walk to the store; pound/pound the metal flat) and in both states and achievements (e.g., the ambiguity of many mental state verbs like recognize, understand , know). The decompositions are also meant to give a uniform representation for telicity (with all telic predications involving a state predicate in the decomposition). However, predicate decompositions of this sort were not originally developed with lexical aspect in mind. They were first introduced by generative semanticists (Lakoff 1968, McCawley 1968) to capture systematic morphological relations between classes of verbs and shared selectional restrictions and entailments between them, as in the following triad: (1) a. The soup is cool. b. The soup cooled. c. The chef cooled the soup.
Introduction: The In(ter)dependence of event structure, aspect and tense
Lingua, 2008
The rationale for bringing together work on tense, aspect and event structure is discussed. Papers by Gehrke, Ramchand, Zagona, Basilico, Van Hout, Guéron and Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria are described, and the connections and disparities between them considered. # Over the past 15 years, generative linguists have devoted intensive study to the syntax and semantics of event structure, making considerable progress in the syntactic of fundamental notions such as state, activity, achievement, accomplishment and semelfactive, and significantly elucidating the relationship between these analyses and verbal semantics, including event decomposition and theta-role assignment. A fairly coherent picture of vP-internal syntax and semantics has emerged in the work of such investigators as Ramchand, van Hout, Borer, Basilico, and the present authors, among many others.
ASPECTS OF ASPECT: PHASIC AND EPISODIC DIMENSIONS OF VERBS
ACTA LINGUISTICA ASIATICA, 2019
The present study sets out to analyze aspectuality and coercion in Persian from a new perspective. With regard to the transcendental aspectual distinction between perfectivity, characterized by boundedness and heterogeneity, and imperfectivity, specified by uniformity and homogeneity (Langacker, 2008), it is argued that the heterogeneity of verbs may be assessed according to their phasic and episodic variables. In other words, in contrast to homogeneous verbs, which lack any kind of boundedness, heterogeneous verbs may occur either in a bounded phasic domain or in a bounded episodic domain. Concerning phasic-episodic features, this study presents a new model of lexical aspect that can differentiate five aspectual categories. The paper also scrutinizes the combinations of different verbs with different sentential operators in order to explain various kinds of type-shifting triggered by different operators. Thereby, two procedures of phasic coercion and episodic coercion are introduced which are responsible for modifying the phasic and episodic features of verbs in order to resolve the semantic conflicts between verbs and sentential operators. These procedures modify the phasic/episodic attributes of verbs according to the viewing frames evoked by interpretative operators.
2006
Aspect contributes important temporal information for the construction of situation models in the human mind. Previous studies examining the effect of grammatical aspect on accomplishment verbs (e.g. bake a cake) show that perfective sentences/utterances are processed faster than imperfective ones (Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Chan et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2004, in press). The present study, however, shows strong interaction between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. More specifically, the results show that perfective facilitation is found on accomplishment verbs, while imperfective facilitation is found on activity verbs. We suggest that this is because the inherent atelic nature of activity verbs matches the unbounded features associated with imperfectives.
A COMPOSITIONAL ACCOUNT OF L2 VERB ACTIONALITY AND THE ASPECT HYPOTHESIS
Syncretic Account may be one possible unifying label for a number of studies which have recently raised some criticism over the Aspect Hypothesis. These approaches claim that neither the cognitive Relevance Principle nor learners' innate knowledge of L2 Actionality can be held as the guiding principle that paves the way for L2 acquisition of Tense-Aspect morphology. This is because: (1) the semantic dimensions of Tense, Aspect and Actionality-especially at early stages of the learning process-are too syncretically intertwined in order to be unambiguously detected from each other: (2) the actional content of L2 verbs too is learned, that is, it is tentatively constructed by learners outside V, at a phrasal level. The present article accounts of how verb actionality in L2 Italian can be derived inductively by postulating a syncretic tentative node TAsp (Tense + Aspect) between what is called Inner and Outer Aspect on the same compositional tree in Verkuyl's Aspectual Theory.
Processing (the) events: lexical and structural ingredients of inner aspect
Connectedness: papers by and for Sarah VanWagenen, UCLAWPL 18., 2014
What is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both these questions. In the first experiment, a processing correlate of telicity is identified by manipulating verbal telicity (inherently telic vs. unspecified verbs) and direct object quantization, finding a principled delay in the use of these verbs’ aspectual representation in which both the verb and its internal argument are required before the comprehension system can commit to a telic or atelic interpretation. In the second experiment, this processing correlate reveals no differences in processing between inherently atelic and unspecified verbs, delayed or otherwise. We argue that together these experiments support theories that distinguish between two verb classifications, a class of inherently telic verbs and a class of unspecified verbs, but not those that include a class of inherently atelic verbs.
12 Aspect Selectors , Scales , and Contextual Operators : An Analysis of by Temporal Adjuncts
at Boulder MANY TEMPORAL ADJUNCTS select for specific aspectual classes; these adjuncts include measure adverbials such as for an hour and interval adverbials such as in an hour. While such adjuncts have traditionally served as diagnostics of telicity, it is only relatively recently that aspectual theorists have elucidated the relationship between the scalarsemantic meanings of these adjuncts and the internal structure of the event representations to which they apply (see Dowty 1979; Herweg 1991; Krifka 1998, among others). Krifka (1998) proposes that both measure adverbials and interval adverbials operate on representations that involve motion along a path. It seems entirely plausible that these adverbials should have path-based meanings, as they concern the "run times" of processes. It is less clear whether path schemas can be applied to the semantics of aspectually sensitive temporal adverbs in general, and particularly those that denote time points. One such adverbial is the by time adverbial (BTA), which will be the focus of our attention in this chapter. An example of the BTA is given in (1): (1) But at least Burger King has signed on, and says that by year end it won't be using any shell eggs. (Wall Street Journal) In (1), the year's end represents a point at which a state (absence of shell eggs) is subject to verification. In the semantic analysis that we propose here, the BTA resembles another aspectually sensitive temporal adverb, still (Michaelis 1993). Both adverbial types have apparently paradoxical behavior: They denote time points but have interval-based semantics. The paradox disappears when we assume that the BTA, like adverbial still, denotes a point and presupposes an interval, specifically, a path schema. In the case of the BTA in particular, we will argue, these path schemas represent conventional sequences of development, for example, schedules. We will use corpus data to survey the variety of discourse contexts in which such sequences are invoked. In this way we further substantiate Krifka's claim that aspectual meaning involves path structures that represent both movement through space and qualitative changes in entities over time.
Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies, 2021
Aspect (the perfective-imperfective distinction) can be verbal or compositional. The probable distribution and redistribution in diachrony of some aspectual devices in English are outlined in a bid to improve the description of aspect in Old/Middle English. The author's model of compositional aspect is employed with its conceptions of the temporal nature of situation participants, the mapping of temporal features between nominals and verbs in the sentence and the inverse relationship across languages of markers of temporal boundedness in verbs and nouns. Leiss' theory of the article-aspect interplay in Proto-Germanic in diachrony is also employed to complete a picture in which aspect in Old English after the emergence of the definite article must have been explicated in compositional terms like in Modern English.