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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.
The "imperfective-paradox" paradox and other problems with the semantics of the progressive aspect
(2000)
This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, of which it has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account. 1 A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive that integrates concepts of nonnality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 1 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. 2 In section 2 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 2.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 2.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 2.3, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
Semantic theories based on predicate-argument structures have always acknowledged that lexical information associated with verbs is the basic source for the rudimentary semantic structure of sentences. The central role of verbs in sentence structure has become a major insight of modern syntactic theories since the lexical turn in linguistics, too. As a result of this development there has been an increasing interest in theories on the lexical representation of verbs. This paper will briefly review prevailing theories on verb semantics (section 1), showing that they can capture only a part of the wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena dependent on verb meaning. For several of these phenomena (section 2) it will turn out that a theory based on highly structured events is more suitable for representing verb meaning. This theory is based on the idea that verbs refer to events that consist of several subevents which are temporally related, classified according to their duration, and whose event participants are connected to some but not necessarily all subevents by semantic relations (section 3).
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.
Theories of aspectual composltlon assume that accomplishments arise when a transitive verb has an incremental theme argument which is realized as a quantized NP-foremost, an NP which is not a mass noun or a bare plural-in direct object position. A problem confronting this assumption is the large number of intransitive, unergative verbs in Getman and English that occur in accomplishment expressions. The paper argues that this problem can be solved within a Standard theory of aspectual composition if additional, independently motivated lexical assumptions about argmnent structure, the representation of implicit arguments and lexical presuppositions are made. It turns out that a distinction between lexically detennined definitcness versus non-definiteness of implicit arguments in particular plays a cmcial role, as weil as one between implicitly reflexive and non-reflexive arguments in that implicitly definite and implicitly reflexive arguments allow for accomplishment expressions. This is explained by the semantics of definiteness and refl.exivity, respectively. Apart from these verbs, there is another large group of unergatives which show that, in contrast to a common assumption in aspectual composition theory, verbs thermselves and not only VPs can be quantized. This leads to a lexical distinction between "mass" and "count" verbs.