Aspectual classes and aspectual composition

Constraining Aspectual Composition

Aspectual Composition in Idioms

Idiomatic utterances contribute by virtue of their aspectual class to the temporal structure of discourse – hence it is essential that theories of aspect derivation and discourse structure should encompass them. A recent claim has been made (McGinnis 2002) that the aspectual class of idiomatic expressions can be derived compositionally, by the same process as in literal language. We examine thi...

Aspectual Classes and Scales of Change

In this paper I outline a theory of aspectual classes based on theories of scalar change (Hay et al. 1999, Kennedy and Levin 2008). Standard models of aspectual classes focus on event decompositional or featural distinctions between predicates. However, such classifications often overor undergenerate, and also do not necessarily capture the temporal properties upon which aspectual classificatio...

Aspectual composition in modern Greek

The rich aspectual system in Modern Greek involves both morphologically expressed grammatical aspect and eventuality types. Particular emphasis is paid to the interaction between grammatical aspect and eventuality types, since it is due to this interaction that the verbal predicate acquires distinct meanings. The main aim of this paper is to explain potential changes in the meaning of the event...

A Computational Approach to Aspectual Composition

In this paper, I argue, contrary to the prevailing opinion in the linguistics and philosophy literature, that a sortal approach to aspectual composition can indeed be explanatory. In support of this view, I develop a synthesis of competing proposals by Hinrichs, Krifka and Jackendoff which takes Jackendoff’s cross-cutting sortal distinctions as its point of departure. To show that the account i...