Table Of ContentTheoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches
to the Semantics of Aspect
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J.W. Goethe-University, Frankfurt McGill University
Liliane Haegeman Sten Vikner
University of Lille, France University of Aarhus
Hubert Haider C. Jan-Wouter Zwart
University of Salzburg University of Groningen
Volume 110
Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect
Edited by Susan Rothstein
Theoretical and Crosslinguistic
Approaches
to the Semantics of Aspect
Edited by
Susan Rothstein
Bar-Ilan University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect / edited by Susan
Rothstein.
p. cm. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, issn 0166-0829 ; v. 110)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Aspect. 2. Semantics. 3. Typology
(Linguistics) I. Rothstein, Susan Deborah.
P281.T44 2007
415'.63--dc22 2007031205
isbn 978 90 272 3374 5 (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2008 – John Benjamins B.V.
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This book is dedicated to the memory of
Keiko Yoshida
27 December 1961–20 January 2007
Table of contents
Introduction 1
Susan Rothstein
part i. Tense, aspect and Vendler classes
1. Lexicalized meaning and the internal temporal structure of events 13
Malka Rappaport Hovav
2. Telicity, atomicity and the Vendler classification of verbs 43
Susan Rothstein
3. Aspects of a typology of direction 79
Joost Zwarts
4. 1066: On the differences between the tense-perspective-aspect systems
of English and Dutch 107
Fred Landman
5. Tenses for the living and the dead: Lifetime inferences reconsidered 167
Anita Mittwoch
part ii. Issues in Slavic aspect
6. Formal and informal semantics of telicity 191
Еlena Paducheva and Мati Pentus
7. Events and maximalization: The case of telicity and perfectivity 217
Hana Filip
8. Aspect and bounded quantity complements in Russian 257
Hans Robert Mehlig
9. Negation, intensionality, and aspect: Interaction with NP semantics 291
Barbara H. Partee
iii Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect
part iii. Aspect in non-Indoeuropean languages
10. Habituality and the habitual aspect 321
Nora Boneh and Edit Doron
11. Aspectual universals of temporal anaphora 349
Maria Bittner
12. The syntax and semantics of change/transition: Evidence from
Mandarin Chinese 387
Hooi Ling Soh
13. Bare nouns and telicity in Japanese 421
Keiko Yoshida
Index 441
introduction
Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches
to the semantics of aspect
Susan Rothstein
Bar-Ilan University
1. Theoretical issues
The papers in this volume deal with a variety of issues in the semantics of aspect, and
have in common that they are all based on talks presented at a workshop on the seman-
tics of aspect which was held at Bar-Ilan University in June of 2005. Before presenting
these papers one by one, I would like to set out what seem to me to be the central
theoretical issues in research in aspect which provide a context for understanding the
relevance of the papers.
Aspect traditionally concerns itself with what Comrie 1976 calls ‘different ways of
viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation’ (pages 3,5). While tense
locates an event at a particular temporal location, aspect is concerned with the structural
properties, or contours, of the event under discussion, independent of its location in
time.1 Traditionally, semantic accounts of aspect have focussed on two different issues,
lexical aspect and grammatical aspect (see the discussion in Smith 1991). Lexical
aspect concerns those properties of event structure which are determined by what are
traditionally called ‘content words’, the meanings of verbs themselves and the modifiers
which modify these verbs, and as such lexical aspect usually (in English type languages
at least) has focussed on structural properties of events expressed by VP internal mate-
rial. Grammatical aspect focuses on operations on event structure introduced by (in
English) VP external material, often functional elements such as inflections, auxiliary
verbs and possibly zero-inflectional elements. I have singled out here four issues which
underlie much research in aspect, including the papers in this volume.
1. I model interpretations in a neo-Davidsonian framework, which assumes that verbs denote
sets of events and thematic roles introduce functions from events to their participants. Much
work over the last 20 years has been devoted to arguing that the neo-Davidsonian framework
provides the most illuminating account of verb meanings and their interaction with aspect,
plurality, quantification, and so on. See e.g., Higginbotham, 1983, 1985, 1986, Parsons 1990,
Landman 1992, 2000, Rothstein 1995, 2004. Note that some notable semanticists, in particular
David Dowty, have consistently argued that the arguments presented are not strong enough to
warrant postulating a Davidsonian or neo-Davidsonian event argument.
