Tense, Aspect, and Argument Structure

Tense, Aspect, and Argument Structure

This paper is concerned with an intriguing difference between Japanese and English involving the progressive form be V-ing and the -te iru form as well as the passive constructions in the two languages. Some of the complex semantic properties of the -te iru construction in Japanese are discussed in Ogihara (1998), where I present a proposal to account for the multiple interpretations associated...

Verbs Aspect and Argument Structure

Aspect and the Syntax of Argument Structure

We use the term " argument structure " to refer to the syntactic configuration projected by a lexical item. It is the system of structural relations holding between heads (nuclei) and their arguments within the syntactic structures projected by nuclear items. While a lexical entry is more than this, of course, argument structure in the sense intended here is nothing other than this. Argument st...

Integrating tense , aspect and genericity

This paper proposes an integrated theory of tense, aspect and genericity building on the work of Moens (1987) for tense and aspect in English. I start by motivating the treatment of tense and genericity at the same level, by showing that (1) it is the same linguistic system that is at work in both cases; (2) there are some facts of language that only receive an adequate explanation if the two p...

A Tense And Aspect Calculus

This paper focuses on a theory of tense and aspect the representation of time in natural language that attempts a formal representation of the relevant lin guistic devices as implication rules in rst order logic It presents a rich ontology as far as verb aspect is concerned distinguishing between complex patterns and vagueness Examples and conclusions are drawn from the com parison between Engl...