This paper, which builds of the work of Hay, Kennedy, and Levin (1999), examines the puzzling aspectual behavior of so-called degree achievements. Drawing evidence from Mandarin Chinese, I argue that degree achievements without difference values denote punctual events, i.e., they are true achievements. I present an analysis that is consistent with facts from both English and Mandarin; to explai...

This paper describes results of a dynamic model of aspectual composition that demonstrates how features necessary for planning and controlling actions can also motivate and ground simple analyses of a number of aspectual phenomena. A novel feature of the model is an active computational representation for verb semantics called x-schemas, an extension of the Petri net formalism that can encode g...

Verbs like begin and enjoy have been assumed to select for events and would coerce an entity-denoting complement to an event in semantic representation; such type-shifting operation engenders additional processing cost. However, recent studies show that this effect is observable only for aspectual verbs (e.g. begin), but not psychological verbs (e.g. enjoy), suggesting the set of “coercion verb...

Verb aspect is a phenomenon of widespread occurrence and considerable variability in the world’s languages (see, e.g., Comrie, 1976; Dahl, 1985). In English its main manifestation consists of two grammatical oppositions, that between the simple and continuous forms of the verb, as in I eat vs I am eating, and that between the simple and perfect forms, as in I eat vs I have eaten. English allows...

In this paper a formal analysis of the aspectual interactions between the verb and the noun phrases (Nps) of simple sentences will be introduced. It is not my purpose to go into detail. Rather, all the concepts will be introduced in an intuitive fashion, and the mathematical expressions will be used only for completeness purposes. The approach here developed will be based on lattices, in a way ...