Integrating Telicity, Aspect and NP Semantics: The Role of Thematic Structure

Slavic languages have a rich inventory of verb affixes that typically have syntactic and semantic effects on the argument structure of the derived verb. Although verb affixes function as operators on verbs, they often restrict the interpretation of certain nominal arguments in a way in which determiners in a nominal construction do. This intriguing fact has not been systematically described in the relevant literature. I propose that verb predicate operators that determine the aspect (perfective and imperfective) of verb predicates also function as "lexical" quantifiers (in the sense of Partee, 1990) over episodic predicates and their arguments. In particular, they bind the variable introduced by the Incremental Theme NP providing it with a quantificational force and/or closely related notions, such as boundedness and definiteness.