The Felicity of Aspectual For-Phrases - Part 2: Incremental Homogeneity

The Felicity of Aspectual For-Phrases - Part 1: Homogeneity

This paper is the first in a series of two papers presenting recent developments concerning the interaction between aspectual classes of predicates and the semantics of aspectual forphrases. Aspectual for-phrases can felicitously modify stative and activity predicates, but not (basic) accomplishment and achievement predicates. Earlier literature proposed that this is because aspectual for-phras...

Incremental Homogeneity in the Semantics of Aspectual For-phrases

This means that the italicized sentences in (1) are required to be homogeneously true at subintervals of an interval of the type specified by the for-phrase. The examples in (1) already make an appropriate definition of the notion of homogeneity non-trivial, since states are argued to be homogeneous down to instants, while activities are homogeneous down to larger intervals whose precise size i...

Contrastive Analysis of Aspectual Oppositions in English and Persian

This article aims at contrasting aspectual oppositions in English and Persian in the context of the novel The Old Man and the Sea, and its translation by Daryabandari (1983) as the data. Unlike English, in Persian perfective and imperfective forms are morphologically marked. While the vast majority of English simple past forms are translated into Persian by past perfective forms, only less than...

Aspectual Constraints on Italian Absolute Phrases Aspectual Constraints on Italian Absolute Phrases

Aspectual Composition in Idioms

Idiomatic utterances contribute by virtue of their aspectual class to the temporal structure of discourse – hence it is essential that theories of aspect derivation and discourse structure should encompass them. A recent claim has been made (McGinnis 2002) that the aspectual class of idiomatic expressions can be derived compositionally, by the same process as in literal language. We examine thi...