Aspectual inquiries (review)

Aspectual inquiries contains a selection of papers presented at the Workshop on the Syntax, Semantics and Acquisition of Aspect held at the University of Iowa in May of 2002. In the introduction, the editors, who organized the workshop, view the study of aspect as fundamentally concerned with interfaces, both in the sense of interfaces formally recognized as such in the architecture of grammar and in the sense of interfaces between subdisciplines of linguistics. These two notions of interface are strongly emphasized in the volume and constitute its main strength. The papers are clustered in three areas of research. Part 1 is concerned with the internal structure of the clause and its relationship to lexical aspect. The papers in Part 2 examine the interaction of aspect, tense, and discourse. Part 3 presents results from studies on aspect in first- and second-language acquisition and in language attrition.

The papers in Part 1 are highly relevant to current discussions about functional categories in generative linguistics. Aspectual issues play an important role in this debate because of the questions they raise about the interplay between lexical information, syntactic structure, and semantic interpretation. The papers analyze the way telicity is built up, appealing to characteristics of the head v of vP, the head Asp of AspP, and the head of some lexical complement category within VP (provided by the object or some prepositional or adjectival phrase). Variation arises within the language and across languages by different feature configurations available for functional and lexical heads.

Elizabeth Ritter and Sara Thomas Rosen propose that languages organize arguments in the syntax in different ways, with concomitant differences in event structure, and illustrate this with data from Hebrew, Finnish, Euchee, and Lisu, among others. Hagit Borer refines proposals made in the literature concerning the quantized nature of arguments. Lisa Demena Travis works out a theory of aspectual composition in which telicity can be encoded in three different heads (functor category v, functional category Asp, and lexical category AP/PP) within an articulate vP. Aspectual distinctions coming from lexical material, as in English resultatives (hammer the nail flat) or DPs measuring out the event (write a letter), and grammatical aspect in v as provided by Slavic prefixes (e.g. Bulgarian na- or Polish po-) can thus be integrated. This proves particularly useful in the description of languages that combine two or more of these strategies, as shown for Navajo and Slave.

Raffaella Folli and Heidi Harley study flavors of v as part of the discussion between lexicalist and syntactic approaches to event structure: does the lexical meaning of a verb determine its syntactic behavior, or does the syntactic construction that the verb occurs in determine its interpretation? Folli and Harley side with the constructionalists, but control for unlimited alternations by proposing that verbs can select for different flavors of v. They posit that sentences like *The sea ate the beach are ungrammatical because eat requires an animate agentive subject. In the resultative construction The sea ate the beach away, the animacy requirement is removed because the sea is a cause, not an agent. Folli and Harley take this to reflect a difference in v between (agentive) DO and (possibly nonagentive) cause. Christina Schmitt’s study of Portuguese copula verbs also intends to isolate meaning components of verbal heads. She analyzes ser as a pure v, while estar denotes v plus the aspectual feature state, and ficar is v plus transition. This explains why ser is aspectually transparent and flexible, and can take up different meanings, whereas the other copulas are more constrained. Mai Tungseth works out an account of the telic/atelic distinction in Norwegian motion constructions in which locative and directional PPs occupy different positions in the syntactic structure. Motion verbs carry a directional feature that must be checked in the complement. These studies all exploit highly...