TENSE, ASPECT AND ASPECTUAL COMPOSITION

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The paper examines the compositional treatment of aspect in Slavic and non-Slavic languages, proposing a unified approach to understanding aspect and Aktionsart without a priori commitment to their distinction. It argues for the existence of an operator ASP α that plays a critical role in linking aspectual structures with tense, and explores perfectivity and imperfectivization in Slavic languages while comparing these phenomena to the grammatical structures in Germanic and Romance languages. By developing a formalism within a compositional framework, the research aims to provide deeper insights into the temporal structuring of languages.

Figures (6)

Focussing now on the feature-values, one may observe that the occurrence of only plus-values in (9a) on the one hand and the occurrence of a minus-value in the other cases, display an opposition between a (tenseless) terminative sentence marked [+Ts] on the one hand and (tenseless) durative sentences marked [—T5] on the other hand. Thus, (9) demonstrates the so-called Plus-Principle, which says that terminative sen- tences need plus-values and that one minus is sufficient to bring about durativity. It should be underscored that features fail to do justice to interdependencies between the verb and its arguments. In other words, only a full fledged semantics in which de- pendencies can be accounted for formally, may help us to characterize and understand the compositionally formed aspectuality of a sentence. On the other hand, from a pre- sentational point of view, the feature notation is quite handy, so I will use it until it is necessary to go deeper into real semantics. Moreover, for Germanic languages like Dutch and English the features serve their purpose very well, because they predict ex- actly the three aspectual classes that are relevant in aspectual composition as can be seen from Figure 1. Here we see that sentences pertain to states if their verb is stative: the nature of the NP does not play a role. Whenever the verb is non-stative (dynamic), there are two possibilities: if an argument is [-SQA] we speak about processes, as in (9b) or (2a). If the argument is [+SQA], we speak about a terminative event.!? Note that the tripartition is construed rather than assumed. This is exactly the reason why I reject the view that Aktionsart is something objective and aspect something subjective: if we want o speak about something in the domain in terms of a (terminative) event we choose inguistic means for doing so as an alternative for choosing different means when we want something presented as a process. From this it follows, that I do not assume the independent existence of ontological classes like states, processes or events, so I do

'4 So, in modeltheoretical terms, given a model M standardly consisting of a domain of interpretation J and an interpretation function J defined on a language L, the present perspective on ontological classe is that J filters out structure in D; cf. De Swart (1996) for an opposite position. The two composite [T]-features in (9) are made up by the features associated with the verb and its argument NPs. The level at which sentential terminativity is formed will be called inner aspectuality. It marks a certain restriction of the scheme (8), which will be useful in exploring the aspectuality of a sentence like (7a) Ivan vypil dva piva za Cas. Its aspectuality taken as a whole (1.e. including the adverbial za Cas) is a matter of outer aspectuality: it involves the interaction between the inner aspectuality of Ivan vypil dva piva and the adverbial za Cas. Outer aspectuality lies outside the scope of the present paper. It is not yet clear whether or not the result of applying tense as an operator INFL on the tenseless S by the rule INFL(S) = S’ yielding a tensed S’, belongs to the realm of outer aspectuality. 3 pot gee 7 as é % ~ a

which x undergoes the predication expressed by the VP.'° Suppose that we follow the second girl on her “Path” through the predication in a specific situation exemplified in Figure 3. At index 1 (provided by the nonstative verb) two of the members of the internal argument denotation are counted as being involved in the predication “being eaten by girly. At index 2, the third and fourth sandwich are counted, and at index 3, all five have been eaten. At the third index, the function connecting indices and members of the internal argument denotation comes to a stop. This explains the terminative nature of the VP eat five sandwiches. The formal machinery necessary to deal with the fact that sentences like (10b) express a set of combinatorial possibilities requires type logic (cf. for details Verkuyl 1995a or Verkuyl 1993). Formally, the Path of girls is essentially a function mapping indices into the internal argument denotation. The representation in Figure 3 should be un- derstood as just illustrating an instantantiation of the sort of information expressed by this function. It represents [VP.] in (11). This VP can be said to be terminative. Note that the distributivity in (11) bears on aspectuality: for each of the three girls there is a terminative event. To account for this we need to assume that the VP forms a semantic unit distributed over each of the girls.

The idea of having an ASP-node as an operator securing a VP-node at which the Plus-principle can be said to operate, is found in Figure 4.74 ances meen Ee Oe The above considerations and options strongly suggest that the Germanic asym- metry scheme in Figure 2 underlies the Slavic languages too, provided that some room can be given to an aspectual operator ASP securing a [+Ty p]-interpretation, if not suf- ficient information about the internal argument is given. The perfective operator “‘cuts out” an event and consequently there should be some limit on the otherwise unspecified quantity of coffee in (23b) and beer in (5). If in Slavic languages there is numerical [+SQA]-information in the internal argument, verb morphology requires a perfective prefix to obtain a full [+T)p]-interpretation.”* OE. SOM Pn Be eg ee cs es Se ee ee ees ce see oe ee SPP ce Be sow ck @ SE elt.

However, there is an alternative solution yielding the structure of Figure 5. There are several recent syntactic proposals along this line. For some, among which Schmitt (1996), the natural place to store Perf as an operator would be the AgrO-position, which is roughly the position taken by ASP in Figure 5. That is, right above the S marked [+ [+Perf] in which the tT | (= Sc hmitt’s V”), there would be a functional node AgrO actualized as aspectual information of the VP-domain can be computed so as to secure a [+Typ]-interpretation, the external argument NP; having been moved out the S’-domain. On t he other hand, others among which Ramchand 1997, Schoorlem- mer (1995) and Dimitrova-Vulchanova (1996), argue for a functional node Asp at that location, which means that they also go along the line of Figure 5. [his proposal will now be briefly discussed here in order to see which sort of value yf the parameter a PROG represents. After that, it becomes possible to discuss the elevant parameters for Slavic languages and at that point a possible choice between ‘igure 4 and Figure 5 will be discussed. I take this route because firstly I will discuss ome proposals about the French Imparfait and Passé Simple in which the format (26) s assumed and discussed, so proceeding along the lines pegged out by it will contribute o a better understanding of some important issues involved. And secondly, we may ven end up with a situation in which we might need both Figure 4 and Figure 5.

an operator on the aspectual information determined by ASP,. From the preceding section it follows that a natural interpretation of the values of a’ is essentially quan- tificational. So, let us assume that a’ stands for values roughly represented as > 1. > lor = 1. On this assumption it becomes clear that ASP, is determined by the contextually or explicitly given frequency adverbials discussed earlier. Note also tha the presence of ASP,, gives us the opportunity to influence a choice between the injec- tive and kolkhoz-collective interpretation. But data in the Slavic languages suggest ar even more important position of ASP, as a numerical operator: its use in secondary imperfectivization. Sentences like (53) show that the C-relation holds “before the multiplication” dis- cussed earlier. That is, (53a) should apply to a situation in which none of the girls had already eaten her five sandwiches. In other words, and in terms of our observation with respect to (37), now for each girl g;, b5, C f,,. Analogously, (53b) describes a situa- tion in which all boys were still involved in writing a letter. This makes the location of ASP in Figure 4 a natural place to account for this progressive split.