Aspect Shift

Words are symbols whose meaning is crucial for human communication. Nevertheless, they are not isolated "islands" of speech; rather, they interdepend to properly convey a certain intended meaning. This interdependence gives rise to language rules that speakers must abide by, rules termed by de Saussure (1986) as langue, which is distinguished from parole. While the former encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system, i.e., the principles of language, the latter refers to concrete instances of language use. Parole is thus the individual expression of language as a series of speech acts. De Saussure compares language to the game of chess. While langue resembles the rules and norms of playing chess, parole parallels the moves that an individual chooses to make, namely, the individual's preferences when playing the game, or, in our case, when using the language.

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.

This paper discusses some of the ways in which the notion of compositionality is understood in the literature. It will argued that on a strict (Fregean) view a verb has a constant meaning to make in the aspectual composition independently from the information contributed by its arguments, that the VP (verb+ internal argument/complement) forms a substantive aspectual unit that should be recognizable as such complex aspectual information; and finally, that aspectual composition forces Discourse Representation Theory into revising the way states and events are taken.

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.

The present dissertation follows from the growing confluence of traditional perspectives regarding Spanish tense and aspect with formal research in tense, aspect, and modality in general. This dissertation provides an overview of proposals made relative to the Spanish imperfecto in particular, but draws on parallel studies involving French and English. The areas of aspect, modality, tense, and sequence of tense are treated.