A Motor-and Image-schematic Analysis of Aspectual Composition

This work addresses the complexities involved in aspectual composition by presenting a cognitively motivated analysis that makes use of active event representations. Verbs, arguments and temporal modiiers are characterized in terms of the conceptual features they impose or contribute to this framework, which employs representations of both motor-schematic and image-schematic change. By accommodating the inherently dynamic nature of temporal events and resource usage, this framework can not only make standard aspectual distinctions (e.g. between states and processes, or between perfective and imperfective processes) but also provide simple analyses of usually diicult aspectual phenomena. The representation also illuminates the interaction between event structure and nominals, which can instantiate pieces of the image-schematic representation or otherwise constrain possible interpretations. Cognitive explanations of event structure distinctions are made more concrete by illustration in the context of the Neural Theory of Language modeling project at the International Computer Science Institute (Feldman et al. 1996).