Aspect, Aspectual Class, and the Temporal Structure of Narrative

This paper consists of two parts. The first part discusses commonsense knowledge about events as manifested in language. Three kinds of knowledge are identified: compositional, durational, and aspectual. Compositional knowledge concerns internal structuring of events into preparatory, initial, main (the body), final, and resulting stages. Durational knowledge concerns durational relations between events and stages of the same event. Durational knowledge can be expressed as qualitative dependencies among the parameters of the event and as its time scale. The notion of time scale is introduced and related to shared cyclical events (time units). In discussing aspectuai knowledge three notions are distinguished: aspect as a grammatical category of the verb, implemented by affixes, auxiliaries, and such; aspectual class, which is a characteristic of a lexical meaning; and the aspectual perspective of the sentence determined by the position of the Reference Time (RT) with respect to the event described by a finite clause. I argue that an aspectual classification of situations evolving in time should be based on such considerations as the kinds of resources they consume and the goals they achieve. A detailed classification of instantaneous and noninstantaneous events is developed. The second part of the paper discusses how this knowledge is employed in understanding extended narratives. Temporal discontinuities, in conjunction with other kinds of discontinuities identified in the paper, signal boundaries between discourse segments; within each segment, all three varieties of temporal knowledge help establish the temporal relations among narrated events.