Aspect shift in stative verbs and their arguments

Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics

The different distinctions related to lexical aspect –state, activity, accomplishments and achievements– play an important role in the grammar of Spanish, but many of the details about how these distinctions can be implemented are unclear: which features distinguish between the classes, how the classes relate to each other, what is the nature of telicity or dynamicity and how one can account for the alternations that a verb is subject to involving its aspect are some of the most important problems from this perspective. The goal of this article is to provide a sufficient empirical base to address these questions and present the current alternatives to answer them.

Romance linguistics 2006: selected papers from …, 2007

Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 2017

The present paper aims at accounting for the Spanish Imperfecto, Perfecto, Pluscuamperfecto and the Indefinido by applying three binary tense oppositions: Present vs Past, Synchronous vs Posterior and Imperfect(ive) vs Perfect(ive). For the sixteen Spanish tense forms under analysis a binary approach leads to covering twelve of them. Their relation with the preterital forms outside the range of the three oppositions is accounted for by two surgical operations: (a) the notion of Imperfect(ive) is severed from the notion of ongoing progress by restricting it to underinformation about completion and by seeing continuous tense forms as involving a more complex semantics; (b) the notion of (non-)stative is strictly severed from interference of information coming from the arguments of a verb. These theoretical moves make the way free for a formal-semantic insight into the interaction of Spanish tense and aspect. It also paves the way for a principled distinction between completion and ant...

2002

2006

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.

Besides the usual stative contexts in the external aspect domain (progressive, perfect, habitual), there are two levels of pure stativity in the vP domain (InitP and RccP). These two levels have clear empirical consequences in Spanish grammar, and interact in different ways with the projection that inserts progression/duration in the eventuality (ProcP).

American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures, 1999

The theoretical aim of this book, indicated by its subtitle, is to elucidate the interface between semantic interpretation and morphosyntactic structure. Its empirical domain, indicated by the title, would appear to be ideally suited to this goal. Tense and aspect are well-studied semantic categories, but ones in which there are still plenty of puzzles. It is reasonable to think that an improved understanding may come about through detailed study of the

For many instances of verb-object combinations involving change of state verbs, different kinds of internal arguments seem to trigger distinct interpretations of the verb phrase. These are usually divided into literal uses, such as romper la ventana ‘break the window’ or cortar el papel ‘cut the paper’ and figurative uses such as romper el desarrollo ‘interrupt the development’ or cortar la circulación ‘cut off the circulation’. Based on an extensive manual annotation of corpus data involving verb-object combinations with Spanish change of state verbs, I argue that combinations like `romper el desarrollo' or `cortar la circulación', far from representing frozen idiom chunks, exemplify very productive compositional patterns. The frequency and naturalness with which change of state verbs take both physical and abstract entities as objects raises the question of how verbs express their meaning and makes this kind of data especially relevant for a theory of the lexicon as well as of composition. I provide a clear inventory of the typical combinatorial patterns of romper and cortar and I show that their combinatorial behaviour is much more diverse than usually acknowledged. I then argue that these facts need to be addressed by the compositional system, rather than by postulating homophonic lexical entires (Dowty, 1979; Alonso Ramos, 2011) or contextualist accounts (Recanati, 2005). For a proposal I turn to Modern Type Theories, which allow me to incorporate a richer notion of lexical semantics within compositional semantics. These theories thus allow me provide an insightful compositional account of what has long been considered non-compositional, namely combinations of change of state verbs with objects denoting abstract entities.

The claim that there are category-neutral primitives shared by nouns, adjectives and verbs (such as boundaries and bodies) makes the prediction that some heads should be sensitive to these primitives rather than to their lexically-specific materialisation as aspect. This article explores this prediction with a case study of a nominaliser: Spanish -ncia ‘-ance’. We claim that this suffix combines with bases that lack initial or final boundaries, or, in other words, bases with an intransformative semantics. This, we argue, explains several puzzles related to this suffix: (i) that it produces both quality and eventuality nominalations, provided that the later are stative; (ii) that it establishes a non-derivational relation with -nte ‘-ant’ and (iii) that is combines (apparently) with eventive bases, where we will show that those bases are interpreted as stative or assimilated to qualities.

Studies in complement control, 2007

Cognitive Linguistics, 2000

Implicit type shifting, or coercion, appears to indicate a modular grammatical architecture, in which the process of semantic composition may add meanings absent from the syntax in order to ensure that certain operators, e.g., the progressive, receive suitable arguments (Jackendo¤ 1997;. I will argue that coercion phenomena actually provide strong support for a sign-based model of grammar, in which rules of morphosyntactic combination can shift the designations of content words with which they combine. On this account, enriched composition is a by-product of the ordinary referring behavior of constructions. Thus, for example, the constraint which requires semantic concord between the syntactic sisters in the string a bottle is also what underlies the coerced interpretation found in a beer. If this concord constraint is stated for a rule of morphosyntactic combination, we capture an important generalization: a single combinatory mechanism, the construction, is responsible for both coerced and compositional meanings. Since both type-selecting constructions (e.g., the French Imparfait) and type-shifting constructions (e.g., English progressive aspect) require semantic concord between syntactic sisters, we account for the fact that constructions of both types perform coercion. Coercion data suggest that aspectual sensitivity is not merely a property of formally di¤erentiated past tenses, as in French and Latin, but a general property of tense constructions, including the English present and past tenses.

Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 2014

This paper explores both the polysemy and the development of the adverb apenas 'barely hardly' into a discourse marker of temporal proximity 'just/recently' . In contrast to well-known expected tendencies in grammaticalization, apenas runs against the cannon. The subjective adverb apenas, that designates events carried out "with effort/difficulty", changed into an objective connector signaling immediacy among events or proximity to the time of speech. The polysemy of apenas is accounted for both synchronically and diachronically, as the interaction between the force-dynamics configuration of the marker and the aspectual configuration of the verb. It is proposed that aspect determines the degree of subjectivity of the event where telicity triggers objective representations and these, in turn, led the way for the emergence of a discourse marker of temporal proximity.

2008

Tense relates an event to a specific point in time, usually the moment of speech, and includes categories such as past, present, and future (Comrie 1985). Aspect, on the other hand, involves "different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation" (Comrie 1976:3) and includes oppositions such as perfective versus imperfective and progressive versus non-progressive. The perfective/imperfective distinction has been characterized in various ways, including viewing a situation as a unified whole (perfective) versus taking into account its internal structure (imperfective) (Comrie 1976), representing the time interval over which the situation occurs as closed or bounded (perfective) versus open or unbounded (imperfective) (González 1998, Montrul & Slabakova 2002), or highlighting the situation's termination (perfective) versus its duration (imperfective) (King & Suñer 2008). Comrie (1976) views progressive aspect as a subcategory of imperfective aspect. He first makes the distinction within imperfectivity between habitual and continuous aspect, and then further subdivides continuousness into progressive and non-progressive manifestations, with the latter corresponding to stative verbs (Comrie 1976:25). Thus, within imperfectivity, non-progressive aspect can refer to either continuous states or habitual actions. As is the case with many languages, Spanish verbal morphology marks both temporal and aspectual distinctions. Of interest to the present paper is how Spanish combines the aspectual distinctions discussed above with past temporal reference, and how this compares with corresponding forms in English. First of all, Spanish has two simple past tenses, the preterite and the imperfect, which encode perfective and imperfective aspect, respectively. In contrast, English has only one simple past tense. An example of the Spanish verb leer 'to read' in the preterite is given in (1) below, while (2) illustrates the sam English verb. (1) Marisol leyó el libro Cien años de soledad. (2) Marisol leía el libro Cien años de soledad. (3) Marisol read the book One Hundred Years of Solitude. The English simple past in (3) is analogous to the Spanish preterite in (1) above, with its default aspectual interpretation being perfective, while the Spanish imperfect in (2) lacks a corresponding * The author would like to thank J. Clancy Clements, César-Félix-Brasdefer, Kimberly Geeslin, Jason Killam, and two anonymous reviewers for the HLS 2006 Proceedings for their assistance with various aspects of this research project including the design and carrying out of the study and helpful comments on earlier drafts. All errors remain my own.