Since Perlmutter (1968, 1970) argued that English aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising, the phenomenon has been argued or assumed to exist in a number of other languages, such as French (Lamiroy 1987, Ruwet 1991), German (Wurmbrand 2001), Greek (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1999), Hebrew (Landau 2003), Italian (Rizzi 1982, Burzio 1986), Japanese (Shibatani 1973, 1978, Kuno 1...

The evidential meaning traditionally attributed to modal auxiliaries is conveyed in Italian and Greek by complex constructions clustering both modal and aspectual features. The evidential reading of Italian and Greek modal auxiliaries, indeed, is only licenced when the modals take as complements stative, progressive, habitual or resultative subordinates. A feature of aspectual incompleteness of...

Composing aspectual concerns with base concerns may raise conflicting situations that need to be identified and resolved. A conflict is detected whenever two or more concerns that contribute negatively to each other and have the same importance need to be composed together. This paper discusses the use of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods to support aspectual conflict management ...

Complex behavior often resists clean modularization in object-oriented languages. Aspectoriented programming tackles this problem by providing ¤exible module boundaries that can span and partition classes. However, in order to achieve this ¤exibility, valuable modularity mechanisms, such as encapsulation and external composition, are lost. The ability to separately compile or reason about a mod...

There are languages – e.g., German, Inuktitut, and Russian – in which the aspectual reference of clauses depends on the telicity of their event predicates. We argue that in such languages, clauses or verb phrases not overtly marked for viewpoint aspect implicate or entail ‘event realization’, a property akin to Parsons’s (1990) ‘culmination’. The aspectual reference associated with the use of c...

Information structure is normally considered to be orthogonal to the syntaxsemantics interface. However, in this paper, I argue that aspectual operators in Russian, notably the imperfective aspect with complete event interpretations, are sensitive to information structure. My goal is to show how the imperfective aspect can be used either to assert or presuppose the existence of a complete event...

The TREC-6 interactive task used a multi-site experimental protocol, where each participating site compared an “experimental” system with a common “control” system used at all sites. For the Oregon Health Sciences University site, the “experimental” system was a Boolean interface to the MG system, while the control system was, as for all sites, the natural language ZPRISE system. Performance wa...

In this paper we investigate the relevance of aspectual type for the problem of temporal information processing, i.e. the problems of the recent TempEval challenges. For a large list of verbs, we obtain several indicators about their lexical aspect by querying the web for expressions where these verbs occur in contexts associated with specific aspectual types. We then proceed to extend existing...