Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, which has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account of. A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive which integrates concepts of normality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 2 I will present several problems connected with the semantics of the progressive that are crucial for shaping its truth conditions. Several solutions to these problems that have been suggested in the literature will be discussed. In section 3 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 3.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 3.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 4, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
Lexical-semantic theories often suffer from the imprecision of the concepts they employ in their representations. This leads to a considerable decrease in empirical strength by inviting circular argumentation. A demonstration of how to go about overcoming such shortcomings will be carried out, using the lexical semantic concept of "punctuality" as an example. Firstly, I will argue that the distinction between punctuality and durativity plays a crucial role for the explanation of a wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. Secondly, I will discuss methodological issues involved in arriving at a more precise definition of punctuality and, finally, the notion of "punctuality" will be given an interpretation on the basis of extensive consultation of research on cognitive time concepts.
Whether verbs have to be marked as punctual vs. durative has been a controversial issue from the very beginnings of research on aktionsarten in the last century right on up to modern theories of aspectual classes and aspect composition. Debates about the linguistic necessity of this distinction have often been accompanied by the question of what it means for a verb to be temporally punctual. In this paper I will, firstly, sketch the history of research on the punctual-durative distinction and present several linguistic arguments in its favor. Secondly, I will show how this distinction is captured in an eventstructure- based approach to lexical semantics. Thirdly, I will discuss the extent to which a precise definition of the notions used in lexical
representations helps avoid circular argumentation in lexical semantics. Finally, I will demonstrate how this can be done for the notion of ‘punctuality’ by clarifying the logical type of this predicate and relating it to central cognitive time concepts.