The Category of Aspect

1. Introduction

0.0 Freed (1976) defined ‘Aspect’ as ‘a notion of Time, distinct from Tense, that refers to the internal temporal structure of events and activities named by various linguistic forms….. in terms of such things as inception, duration, completion..’ The definition suggests that Tense and Aspect, as functional categories that delimit the lexical category Verb, ‘merge/interconnect’ in more ways than one.

The two categories are not only related morpho-syntactically (Aspect like Tense is realized by verb inflections and auxiliaries) but also ‘semantically’. The definition says that both Aspect and Tense partake of the notion ‘Time’ but in distinct ways. The verbal category of Aspect and the verbal category of Tense are tightly related as they both pertain to the domain of time.

Let us consider the following pair of sentences:

(1) a) John read a book b) John was reading a book (when the phone rang / at 3 o’clock) Both sentences describe a situation of ‘John reading a book’. The difference between the sentences in (1) is not in terms of Tense (both are in the past tense) but in terms of Aspect. The sentence in (1a) presents the situation as a whole, as completed, as closed, while the sentence in (1b) presents only some internal phases/stages in the development of the situation; we do not know when John began reading the book or whether he finished reading it – we only know that his reading was unfolding in Time when the phone rang/at 3 o’clock. Intuitively, Aspect predicates about the size of a situation (the whole of it or only parts of it) while the contribution of Tense is to locate that situation in time. Both Tense and Aspect pertain to the domain of Time as situations, irrespective of their size, occur in time.

The generally accepted definition of the category of Tense is that Tense represents “the chronological order of events in time as perceived by the speaker at the moment of speaking’. The important characteristic of Tense (viewed as the grammaticized form of Time, roughly the present tense, the past tense and the future tense) is that it locates the time of the situation described in the sentence relative to the moment of speaking1. This means that we cannot conceive of a past or future event unless we have a present moment of time in mind (e.g., Marianne arrived last night cannot be interpreted unless the hearer has a ‘today, a present moment of time’ in mind with respect to which Marianne’s arrival can be located).

This is why Tense is characterized as being a deictic category (oriented towards the time of the speaking ego): it relates different kinds of situations to the speech time and structures them by the relations of simultaneity and sequence (see the Category of Tense).

1 The category of ‘Tense’ depends on egocentric orientation, hence it has been described as a ‘deictic’ (i.e. pointing) category1

Aspect, on the other hand, is not a deictic category, but rather informs us about the contour or quality of the event/state as viewed by the speaker at a given moment in time (i.e reference point). 1.0. Following Comrie (1976), we could state the difference between Tense and Aspect as one between situation-internal time (Aspect) and situation-external time (Tense).

The term ‘aspect ’ was imported into the Western grammatical tradition from the study of Slavic grammar in the early nineteenth century, it being a loan translation from the Slavic term ‘vid ’ which is etymologically cognate with the words ‘view ’and ‘vision ’, hence the term viewpoint aspect has been widely adopted in current literature. (Smith 1991).

In traditional grammars, the notion ‘Aspect’ is restricted mostly to the perfective -imperfective distinction expressed by inflectional morphemes on the verb or by special function morphemes within a verbal complex. From this perspective, the most widely accepted definition is Comrie’s (1976: 3-4) who, quoting Holt, (1943) defines “aspects” as " different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation….2”.

The perfective provides a holistic, summarizing or unifying view upon the situation described in the sentence, while the imperfective is concerned with the temporal constituency of a situation which is presented as divided up into internal phases, there being no concern for the whole situation.

In Comrie’s own words “ another way of explaining the difference between perfective and imperfective meaning is to say that the perfective looks at the situation from outside, without necessarily distinguishing any of the internal structure of the situation, whereas the imperfective looks at the situation from inside, and as such is crucially concerned with the internal structure of the situation, since it can look backwards toward the start of the situation and look forwards to the end of the situation, and indeed is equally appropriate if the situation is one that lasts through all time, without any beginning and without any end” (Comrie, 1976:4). In present day linguistics this is known as ‘viewpoint aspect’ (Smith 1991).

The viewpoints are similar across languages but not identical. That is why knowing a language includes knowing the semantic value of the viewpoints and their distribution.

There are various ways in which languages grammaticize the perfective – imperfective aspectual opposition. For instance, Russian and Chinese use different affixes to distinguish between the two aspects. English and Dutch avail themselves of syntactic means to signal the opposition: for instance; the contemporary English form ‘He is working’ (be + V-ing) developed historically from ‘He is on/at working’ (in time, the prepositions, reduced to a or o, disappeared). Languages like Romanian, French or Old Greek make use of syncretic means to signal the opposition (i.e., the grammatical markers of Aspect have fused with those of Tense). For instance, the Romanian prezent and imperfect signal imperfective aspect while tenses such as the perfect compus, the perfect simplu, the mai mult ca perfect signal perfective aspect.

In English, the opposition perfective–imperfective has not been fully grammaticized but the opposition non-progressive – progressive is compatible with it. Progressive aspect is signalled by distinct morphological marking: be – ing (e.g., He is/was running). Perfective aspect (also called “simple / indefinite aspect”) is rendered by

2 In the original text ‘les manieres diverses de concevoir l’ecoulement du proces meme’. A literal translation would be ‘different ways of conceiving the flow of the process itself (see also Stefanescu , 1988:320)2

the simple temporal form of the verb with no distinct morphological marking (e.g., He ran). 1.1. In current literature, the “modern” concept of “Aspect” reflects a “double life”. It is still used to refer to the presentation of events through grammaticized viewpoints such as the perfective and imperfective, (‘viewpoint/grammatical’ aspect), but lately the use of the term has broadened to include the inherent temporal structuring of the situations themselves, the internal event structure or Aktionsart; this is known in current literature as ‘situation-type aspect’

The term ‘situation-type aspect’3 (Smith, 1991) will be employed to refer to the classification of verbal expressions into states, activities, accomplishments, achievements (introduced by Vendler, 1957/1967) and semelfactives (introduced by Smith 1991) The latter view of Aspect originated in the classification of verb meanings in the philosophy of action (cf. Ryle,1949; Kenny,1963,Vendler,1957/1967).

The entities that verbal expressions categorize as states, activities, events (i.e. accomplishments and achievements) are situations or states of affairs . These idealized situation types represent the temporal classifications of actual situations/states of affair that people make on conceptual and cognitive grounds. (Smith 1991).

The situation types differ in the temporal properties of dynamism, durativity and telicity4 (boundedness). The classification is discussed in detail in the following subchapter. The examples below illustrate the situation types mentioned above as well as their temporal properties (Smith 1991:6):

(i) States are static, durative: love Susan, know the answer, live in London, be widespread, enjoy life

(ii) Activities are dynamic, durative, atelic: laugh, stroll/walk in the park, push a cart, drink beer, swim, run

(iii) Accomplishments are dynamic, durative and telic: build a house, walk to school, learn French, drink a bottle of beer, smoke a cigarette

(iv) Achievements are dynamic, telic, instantaneous: win the race, reach the top, find a watch, recognize a friend, discover a treasure, arrive, leave

(v) Semelfactives are dynamic, atelic, instantaneous: tap, cough, knock, hit, flap a wing, hiccup, slam/bang the door, kick the ball.

From this perspective, Smith(1991) defines ‘Aspect’ as ’ the semantic

domain of temporal structures of situations :‘ Both viewpoint (or grammatical) aspect and situation type aspect convey information about temporal factors such as beginning, end and duration, hence they interact in language.’ (Smith1991:5).The aspectual meaning of a sentence is a composite of the information from both components. 1.2. The ‘grammatical/viewpoint aspect’, perfective and imperfective, is often not clearly distinguished from the ‘(inherent) lexical aspect/situation-type aspect’ since both components convey information about temporal factors of a situation such as beginning,

3 Other terms used to refer to the situation types are eventuality type, inherent lexical aspect or Aktionsart4 The term is Greek in origin: something that has telos is limited or bounded. Telic events have a natural endpoint, whereas atelic events do not.3

end and duration. Although these two domains are related, it has been also argued that we need to draw a clear line between them.

Distinguishing between the semantic contribution of aspectual operators (such as for instance the ‘progressive’ in English) and the (lexical) semantic properties of verbal predicates to which aspectual operators are applied is necessary in order to account in an adequate way for their systematic interactions, as they are manifested in what is known as the ‘imperfective paradox’ (Dowty, 1977, 1979) or ‘partitive puzzle’ (Bach, 1986), for instance.1.2.1 First and foremost, ‘situation-type aspect` on the one hand, and ‘viewpoint aspect’ (Smith, 1991) or `grammatical aspect` (de Swart,1998) on the other hand are realized differently in the grammar of a language, i.e. they differ in their linguistic expression:

a) viewpoint/grammatical aspect is signalled by a grammatical morpheme; it is therefore distinguished as an overt category (i.e. it exemplifies the notion of an overt category)

b) situation-type aspect (eventuality type) is signalled by a constellation of lexical morphemes. Situation/eventuality types are distinguished at the level of the verb constellation (i.e. the verb and its arguments (subject and objects)) and the sentence. The situation types play a role in the grammar of a language, although they lack explicit morphological markers (Smith, 1991). Since situation types are not `grammaticized` by contrasting morphemes (i.e. have no single grammatical marker), situation type aspect could be taken to exemplify the notion of a covert category. Situation types play a role in the grammar of a language, although they lack explicit morphological markers. (Smith, 1991:10)

The two components of the aspectual system of a language interact with each other in all languages, although across languages, aspectual systems vary considerably, especially the ‘grammatical/viewpoint’ subsystem. Situation types can be distinguished as covert categories in all languages (Smith, 1991). 1.2.2 Since ‘Aspect’ has been assumed to be defined as the interaction of the lexical meaning of the verb, the nature of its arguments (subject and objects) and grammatical inflection, aspectual meaning holds for sentences rather than for individual verbs or verb phrases. (Verkuyl 1972, Dowty 1979, Smith 1991, etc).

Sentences present aspectual information about situation/eventuality type and viewpoint. Although they co-occur, the two types of information, as already mentioned, are independent, the receiver of the message being aware of how much of the situation is presented and to what situation type it belongs Consider the aspectual information conveyed to a receiver of the examples in (1) below (Smith 1991:5):

(1) a) Mary walked to schoolb) Mary was walking to schoolc) Mary walked in the park

Example (1a) presents a situation that is characterized as telic : it has a goal/outcome, a ‘natural endpoint’ (signalled by the expression `to school`). This information is given by the non-finite component of the sentence, namely [Mary walk to school] which includes the verb and the participants/the arguments [Mary] and [to school]. The situation is described as ‘closed’, ‘complete’ (perfective viewpoint), i.e. as

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having occurred at a time previous to ‘now’. This information is given by the finite part of the sentence, in this particular case the ‘past tense morpheme’ on the verb.

Example (1b) presents part of the same situation but does not convey whether the goal was reached. The receiver gets only a partial view of the situation (imperfective viewpoint). This is signalled by the `progressive` form of the verb. Example (1c) presents a complete/closed situation ( perfective viewpoint) that does not involve a goal; the event was simply terminated.

As can be seen, aspectual information is given by the linguistic forms of the sentences: situation type is signalled by the verb and its arguments (the non-finite part of the sentence), while viewpoint is signalled by a grammatical morpheme, usually part of the verb or verb phrase. (Smith 1991). The perfective viewpoint gives information about endpoints (a full view of the situation as in (1a,c)), while the imperfective gives information about internal or other stages or phases (a partial view of the situation as in (1b) )

.An important point made by Smith (1991) is that the domain of Aspect offers choices within a closed system to the speakers of a language. There is a small, fixed set of viewpoints and situation/eventuality types; one of each must be chosen whenever a sentence is framed.. What is meant by this is that speakers` choices in presenting actual situations are limited by conventional categorization, conventions of use and the constraints of truth.

Before we embark upon discussing the interaction between the two components of the aspectual system we consider it necessary to dwell on the characterization of the two components separately, in turn.

2.0 Eventuality/Situation Type Categories

2.1 The identification of eventuality/situation types has been extremely important for the analysis of a number of linguistic phenomena. (Filip, 1999:16)

a) First, they are indispensable for the description of grammatical/viewpoint aspect and the distribution of adverbials in natural languages. Instrumental and adverbial adjuncts in sentences are in fact modifiers of the situation as such (expressed by the verb and its arguments) and not of the verb alone.

b) Second the fine-grained semantic distinctions that underlie the classes play an important role in the syntax-semantics interface in the domain of argument structure i.e. participant structure. Predicates differ in the number of arguments (participants) they take and in the interpretation assigned to the arguments. The number of arguments and their interpretation is due to the event(uality) structure of the respective predicate.

c) Third, eventuality/situation types play a role in the understanding of such grammatical phenomena as the choice of auxiliary in Italian, German, Dutch and French (Zaenen, 1987,1988,1993)

Given the important role played by verbs in the grammar of natural languages the assumption is that verbs as lexical items contain in the lexical entry besides categorial and phonological information, semantic information which is expressed by its ‘event(uality) structure’.

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The assumption (Davidson 1966) is that each and every verb has an ‘event variable’ (=e) as part of its semantic structure. The letter ‘e’ is an abbreviation for the fact that the verb may be used as a predicate to denote an eventuality/situation that is characterized as ‘dynamic’ and hence can be located in place and time. The presence of the event variable ‘e’ accounts for the semantic interpretation of adverbials and other modifiers. Adverbials, progressive form, instrumentals, etc are modifications of event(ualities) not of verbs per se. Let’s consider the following example borrowed from Davidson (apud Cornilescu 1995:206):

(1’) Jones buttered the toast in his bedroom with a knife at midnight

The sentence describes an event(uality) (=e) namely that of ‘toast-buttering by Jones’. This sentence consists of the predicate ‘butter’ which expresses a certain relation with two nominal phrases, in this particular case, “Jones” and “the toast”. The presence of the two nominal phrases (NPs) are essential for the semantic (and syntactic) well-formedness of the sentence. Our knowledge of the verb butter includes knowledge of the verb’s participant/argument structure, i.e. knowledge of the number of participants/arguments involved in the situation described by the predicate.

Syntactically, the two NPs function as the ‘subject’ and the ‘direct object’; from a semantic point of view, each nominal phrase is associated with a semantic /conceptual/participant role: Jones is understood as Agent or Doer and the toast as the Patient or Undergoer. These two NPs are the arguments of the verb.

The prepositional phrases (PPs) are not related to the verb ’butter’ at all, i.e. they are not part of the participant structure (meaning) of the verb. Their role is to make precise the location in time and space of the situation described by the predicate.

Knowledge of the verb’s participant structure is made possible by the ‘event(uality) structure’ ( the ‘eventuality/situation types that the respective verb instantiates) i.e. the meaning of the respective verb.

In current linguistic theory the ‘meaning’ of verbs is represented by certain conceptual configurations (verb components) labeled as lexical conceptual structure (=LCS) which ultimately represent the decomposition of the verbs ‘meaning’ into more elementary predicates such as DO, CAUSE, BECOME. The meaning of the verb ‘butter’ can be represented as follows:

(1’’) butter: [x DO] CAUSE [y COME BE with butter}

The letters ‘x, y’ are called ‘variables’ and, within the sentence in (1’) above, they are Jones (for x) and the toast (for y).5

On the other hand, the three prepositional phrases ( =PPs) ‘in the bedroom/with a knife/at midnight ‘ are sentence constituents that are not obligatorily required, but are not excluded by the verb ‘butter’. These constituents are called ‘adjuncts’ or ‘modifiers’. These constituents characterize the entire event(uality) (i.e. the verb and its arguments) offering supplementary information concerning the location in place and time, etc. of the eventuality of ‘toast-buttering by John’. The role of the event variable (‘e’) in the lexical entry of the verb ‘butter’ is therefore to account for the semantic contribution of modifying adverbials (i.e. adjuncts).

5 The above LCS characterizes the semantic/event structure of the situation/eventuality type called ‘accomplishment’ (Dowty, 1979)6

2.1.1 An important point that we would like to insist upon is the type of entities that the classification into situation/eventuality types concerns, since there is a common confusion as to whether it concerns particular/actual situations (i.e. actual occurrences of eventualities) or their linguistic representations. The answer to this problem is given in the following quotation from Filip, H. (1999):

“The assumption that eventuality (i.e. situation) types have to do with our common sense beliefs, rather than with linguistic categories, might lead us to proposing that what we classify into eventuality types are particular eventuality occurrences in the world. However, such a proposal is problematic in many respects and must be rejected. For example, it allows for the misconception that there is a certain unique way in which the world is structured which our language categories conveniently pick out. On this view, the world has exactly the structural properties that we attribute to it when we use our linguistic representations. Hence, distinguishing between different kinds of verbal predicates on the basis of the different kinds of eventualities they denote is dictated by the way the world is structured.

However, this cannot be the case, because there is more than one way the world is , independently of our linguistic (or any other) representations of it. The world has all the structure that we attribute to it when we use our particular conceptual scheme (e.g. natural language, for example) and it has more structure than we are able to pick out with our linguistic categories. This structure exists quite independently of the fact whether we attribute certain structural properties to the world. There may be other conceptual schemes, apart from natural language, we could use that would allow us to pick out a different sort of structure in the world.

Natural languages provide us with a wealth of categories, or particular shared “knowledge structures ”, which enable us to convey information about the world. For example, we may point to a piece of gold and felicitously assert (76a) using a mass noun phrase or (76b) with a count noun phrase (see Dahl,1981:83).

(76) a. This is gold. b. This is a nugget.

Similarly, seeing John drinking coffee from a cup, we can represent what we see either by means of an atelic eventuality description (a process) or a telic one (event):

(77) a. John drank coffee. atelic, (activity)b. John drank a cup of coffee. telic, (event)

The relevant distinctions, count vs.mass and telic vs.atelic, should be viewed as distinctions between predicates, nominal and verbal, respectively. Verbal and nominal predicates provide us with certain choices in the description of aspects of reality. The relevant classificatory criteria that underlie these distinctions are not inherent in the domain of individuals and eventualities but in nominal and verbal predicates. The fact that we distinguish between different kinds of eventualities is an artifact of our linguistic categories.

In short, eventuality descriptions, denoted by verbal predicates and sentences, represent certain conventional ways in which languages tend to lexicalize the structure of various states of affairs in the real world.” (Filip, H. (1999:70)

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The same point is also made by Galton (1984:25) who states that the distinction between aspectual classes is not ‘a distinction inherent in what goes on, but rather a distinction between the different ways we have of describing it’.

Smith (1991: 12) makes the same statement when she discusses the aspectual choices that a speaker may have. The speaker, when talking about actual situations call on ‘idealizations of situations’…….’ Idealized situation types …are classifications that people make on perceptual and cognitive grounds. Like other cognitive categories they are organized on the prototype model with a cluster of defining properties. One and the same situation (a ship moving) may be rendered/talked about by means of two situation types. Consider the example below (Smith, 1991: 12):

(2) a) The ship movedb) The ship was in motion

The first sentence presents an Activity, a dynamic situation type, while the second presents a State. The sentences contrast with each other in the key properties they ascribe to the situation.2.2. In the literature on aspect, Aristotle is acknowledged as the first who noticed that the meaning of some verbs in natural languages necessarily involve an `end` or `result` in a way that other verbs do not.

Aristotle, in the Metaphyisics 1048b, distinguished between kineseis (translated ‘movements/performance) and energiai (actualities), a distinction which roughly corresponds to the distinction between ‘events’ (+telic) e.g. lose weight, build a house, etc. and activities/states (-telic/atelic) e.g. live, think, see, swim, walk etc. Aristotle is therefore the first to notice that the meaning of a verb is expressible as a set of components, a set of entailments that follow from the use of the verb as a predicate, i.e. the meaning of certain verbs involves ‘movement, motion, change’ whereas others involve ‘action, energy’.

Aristotle’s distinctions were taken over by several Oxford philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle (1949), Anthony Kenny (1963) and Zeno Vendler (1957,1967) who improved upon Aristotle’s classes by taking into consideration more grammatical and logical criteria that proved extremely relevant for linguistic methodology.(Dowty, 1979:53) 2.3. Zeno Vendler (1967) was the first to identify four distinct categories of verbs by their restrictions on time adverbials, tense (the ‘progressive’ in particular), and logical entailments, i.e he was the first to offer linguistic criteria to distinguish the categories from one another. The four categories identified by Vendler are states, activities, accomplishments and achievements. More specifically Vendler’s proposal seemed to incorporate the claim that the category of verbs of any particular language can be split up into these four categories (Verkuyl: 1989:39). Examples illustrating Vendler’s categories are given below:

(3) States: believe, desire, have, own, resemble, love Activities: swim, walk, push a cart, breatheAccomplishments: draw a circle, make a chair, deliver a sermon, recover from

illness

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Achievements: realize, recognize, spot, lose, find, reach,

Vendler ’s classification, kept at the lexical level, i.e. at the verbal level, is based on the following criteria: duration over time, change, set terminal point (i.e. telicity)` and homogeneity. The verb-classes identified by Vendler are characterized by the following time-schemata (Verkuyl, 1989:43):

(4) STATE: A loved somebody from t1 to t2 means that any instant between t1 and t2 A loved that person.

ACTIVITY: A was running at time t means that time instant t is on a time stretchthroughout which A was running.

ACCOMPLISHMENT: A was drawing a circle at t means that t is on the time stretch in which A drew that circle

ACHIEVEMENT: A won a race between t1 and t2 means that the instant at which A won the race is between t1 and t2

According to Verkuyl (1989: 43) the two crucial parameters involved are: a) the temporal units involved i.e. instant and stretch; and b) the (in)definiteness of the temporal unit involved, expressed as any, a and the (italicized by Vendler himself) and the division should be analysed as a partition in which the four classes are intended to be on equal footing.

The matrix induced by (4) is the following: States and Activities share the property of pertaining to non-unique, indefinite temporal entities (expressed as a, any) . Achievements and Accomplishments involve unique, definite temporal units (expressed as the)

States and Achievements pertain to instants , so they cannot be viewed as processes going on in time.

Activities and Accomplishments are conceived of as processes going on at time stretches, and Verkuyl, 1998:44).

One of the things Vendler pursued was the way in which the 4 categories are to be grouped together. He argued that States and Achievements should be set apart from Activities and Accomplishments on account of the fact that the first two categories lack the progressive (his ‘continuous tense’):

(5) a. John is swimming (activity)b. John is building a house (accomplishment)c. *John is knowing the answer (state)d. *John is recognizing his long lost sister (achievement)

States lack the progressive because, although they last “for a period of time ”, they do not denote a process over time, they “cannot be qualified as actions at all ” (Vendler, 1967:106). For instance, if John is tall he is tall over his adult lifetime and irrespective of whether he stands up or sits down. If we were to restate this in different

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terms we would say (following Taylor and Dowty) that to determine the truth value of a state predication one does not need to consider more than a moment of time..

Achievements, on the other hand, encode the inception or termination of an act and “occur at a single moment ”(Vendler,1967:103). In Dowty’s terms they are ‘becomings or changes of state’ and are conceptualized as instantaneous/punctual. For example, a sentence such as John found a penny in the street, is interpreted aspectually as ‘ John has the penny in his pocket the instant he finds it but not before’. Such an instantaneous event is a change of state, as John did not have the respective coin before he found it but he had it after he found it.

Activities and accomplishments differ from States and Achievements in so far as they “are processes going on in time, that is, roughly (...) they consist of successive phases following one another in time ” (Vendler,1967:99).

So the ‘continuous form’ criterion seems to be based on the opposition [+/- Process) as well as on some ‘unclear notion of agentivity’ (Verkuyl 1989:49)

Unlike Activities, though, Accomplishments have an essential feature, namely they “proceed toward a terminus (i.e. a set terminal point) which is logically necessary to their being what they are” (Vendler,1967:101). “ While running or pushing a cart has no set terminal point, running a mile and drawing a circle do have a ‘climax ’,which has to be reached if the action is to be what it is claimed to be ” (Vendler,1967:100). This has the following consequence: Activities are homogeneous, while Accomplishments are non-homogeneous.

Nevertheless, further studies have shown that the progressive does not provide a suitable criterion for considering States and Achievements as belonging to one ‘genus’.

Dowty (1979), Bach (1981), among others, observe that many stative predicates can be used, with special interpretations, in the progressive. (e.g. The river is smelling particularly bad these days;I am hating morphology classes, George is being obnoxious).

Dowty(1977,1979), Mourelatos (1978/1981) and Vlach (1981), among others, point out that many achievement verbs in Vendler’s list can appear in the progressive: He is winning the race/ is dying/ is reaching the top/is falling asleep/is leaving, for example.

The decisive semantic property that is shared by Achievement and Accomplishment predicates has to do with the fact that they “involve a product, upshot, or outcome ” i.e they are [+telic]. This sets them clearly apart from State and Activity predicates.

Apart from Vendler, other philosophers and linguists have tried to make precise the intuitions that underlie the classification of verbal predicates.

Recent approaches favor the tripartite distinction into States, Processes and Events, which is ontologically wider, because it is not restricted to verbs that denote actions instigated by human agents (see Mourelatos, 1978/1981; Carlson,1981; Bach,1981,1986; Parsons,1990). The category ‘event’ subsumes Vendler ’s Accomplishments and Achievements. 6

6 According to Filip (1999) many language phenomena clearly indicate that not only Accomplishments and Achievements form a natural class (events), but also States and Processes, in some respects at least, exhibit significant semantic and syntactic similarities in their behavior. Therefore, on the most general level of classification, two main classes of verbal predicates and sentences are distinguished: Events (i.e. accomplishment and achievements), which are telic (i.e. presuppose an endpoint, an outcome, a result, a goal) and quantized (non-homogeneous) and States and Processes, which are atelic and cumulative. (homogeneous)10

The three main classes of verbal predicates and sentences distinguished: i.e. events (including. accomplishments and achievements), states and processes, are characterized by de Swart (1998) as in the chart below:

HOMOGENEOUS NON- HOMOGENEOUS / QUANTIZED

state process event

STATIVE DYNAMIC

2.4 Syntactic and semantic criteria for eventuality type identification.In what follows we shall offer a presentation of tests suggested by linguists and

philosophers in their pursuit to make precise the intuitions that underlie the classification of verbal predicates into classes.

The most complete list of tests can be found in Dowty (1979: chapter 2) who gives the syntactic and semantic criteria based on Ryle (1949), Kenny (1963), Vendler (1957/1967), Lakoff (1965), Ross (1972). The summary of tests we have adopted heavily draws on Dowty (1979) and Filip (1999: 19 and foll.).

I Non-stative testsThe distinction between stative and non-stative goes back to Lakoff (1965). The

non-statives include Activities and Accomplishments. Achievement predicates are like Statives according to some of the statitivity tests and non-stative in other cases ,such as the habitual interpretation in the simple present, as remarked by Dowty (1979:60; Smith , 1991).

The usual tests are as follows: (swim is an activity, build a kite is an accomplishment, know/be sick is a state, recognize is achievement):

a) Only non-statives occur in the progressive:

(6) i) John is swimming ii) John is building a kite iii) *John is knowing the answeriv) *Mary is recognizing her long lost mother

b) Only non-statives occur as complements of force and persuade

(7) i) John forced/persuaded Mary to swimii) John forced/persuaded Mary to build a kiteiii) *John forced/persuaded Mary to know the answeriv) *John forced Mary to recognize her mother

c) Only non-statives can occur as imperatives:

(8) i) Swim!

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ii) Build a kite!iii) *Know the answer!iv) *Recognize your mother!

d) Only non-statives co-occur with the adverbs deliberately, carefully:

(9) i) John swam carefullyii) John deliberately built a kiteiii) *John deliberately knew the answeriv) *Mary deliberately recognized her mother

e)Only non-statives appear in pseudo-cleft constructions with the auxiliary do :

(10) i) What John did was swimii) What the rock did was roll down the pathiii) What John did was build a kiteiv) *What John did was know the answer

f) Only non-statives have a habitual (frequentative) interpretation in the simple present (in unmarked (normal) contexts (Kenny 1963):

(11) i) John swims in the oceanii) John builds a kiteiii) John knows the answeriv) John recognizes his long lost brother

The examples in (11iii,iv) do not involve more than one occasion of knowing the answer/recognizing. The other two predicates, if they are used in normal non-specialized contexts, are understood to involve more than one event of swimming or building a kite, respectively.

II “-for an hour, spend an hour -ing

This criterion distinguishes Achievements and Accomplishments from Activities and States. Only Activities and States can occur with durative temporal for-phrases and as complements of spend -amount of time:

(12) (i) John swam in the ocean for an hour(ii) Max was ill for 10 days(iii) ?John built the kite for an hour(iv) *John recognized his long lost brother for an hour

III “-in an hour, take an hour to-”This criterion is meant to distinguish Activities and States from Achievements and Accomplishments. Only Accomplishments and Achievements can occur with time span in-phrases and as complements of take -amount of time to-:

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(13) (i) (*)John swam in an hour.(ii) (*)Max was sick in two years(iii) John built the kite in an hour(iv) John recognized his long lost brother in a few minutes

(14) (i) (*)It took John an hour to swim in the ocean(ii) (*)It took Max a year to be ill(iii) It took John an hour to build the kite(iv) It took John a few minutes to recognize his brother

Nevertheless, the entailments of Achievements differ from those of Accomplishments. If John built a kite in an hour is true, then it is true that John was building the kite during that hour. But from the truth of the example in (13iv) and (14iv) it does not follow that John was recognizing his brother throughout the period of a few minutes. Actually, the meaning of the time-span expression with Achievements is ‘after a few minutes’ .7

Schematically this difference in entailments can be rendered as follows (Dowty, 1979:59):

(15) If is an accomplishment verb, then x ed in y time entails that x was ing during y time;If is an achievement verb, then ed in y time does not entail x was ing during y time.

IV ‘-for an hour’ entails ‘ at all times in the hour’Just like the previous two criteria, this criterion is also mainly intended to set States and Activities apart from Accomplishments (see Dowty,1979:57).This test is related to Vendler ’s homogeneity property: If John swam for an hour, then at any time during that hour it was true that John swam. If John built a kite for an hour, then it is not the case that he built a kite at any time during that hour. The difference in entailment might be represented as in (16) below (Dowty, 1979:57):

(16) If is an activity verb, then x -ed for y time entails that at any time during y, x-ed was true. If is an accomplishment verb, then -ed for y time does not entail that x-ed was true during any time within y at all.

V ‘x is -ing’ entails ‘x has -ed’This test goes back to Kenny (1963),who introduced it to differentiate Activity

verbs from Accomplishment/Achievement verbs (his‘performances’). For activity verbs, the entailment from the progressive form “x is -ing ” to the simple form “x has -ed ” is valid, while for accomplishment/achievement verbs it is not.(17i) is said to entail (17ii). On the other hand, sentences in (18i) do not entail those in (18ii):

7 The same interpretation holds for Activities. The time-span expression in the sentences in (13i, 14i) is understood as ‘after an

hour’. In short, with Achievements and Activities the time indicated by the time-span adverbial is calculated from a contextually given reference point, while with Accomplishments it is calculated from the beginning of the eventuality itself.

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(17) (i) John is swimming entails(ii) John has swum

(18) (i) John is building a kite/John is winning the race. does not entail

(ii) John has built a kite/John has won the race

This difference in entailment can be represented as in (19) below (Dowty 1979:57):

(19) If is an activity verb, then x is (now) -ing entails that x has -ed. If is an accomplishment verb, then x is (now) -ing entails that x has not (yet) -

ed.

. The problems related to the treatment of sentences like ‘John is building a kite’ which are often summed up under Dowty ’s (1972,1977,1979) label ‘imperfective paradox ’, will be discussed in the chapter dedicated to ‘Viewpoint/Grammatical Aspect’.

VI Complement of stopAchievements cannot occur as complements of ‘ stop’ but Accomplishments, Activities and States do:

(20) (i) John stopped swimming(ii) John stopped building a kite (iii) (?) John stopped being sick after he took the medication(iv) *John stopped recognizing his long-lost brother

Nevertheless we have different entailments for activity and accomplishment predicates. The activity predicate in (20i) entails that ‘John swam’ whereas from (20ii) we are not entitled to conclude that ‘John did build a kite’, but only that he ‘was building’ a kite, which he may or may not have finished.

VII Complement of finishIt is a distinguishing characteristic of Accomplishments that they can normally occur as complements of ‘finish’:

(21) (i) John finished building the kite(ii) *John finished recognizing his long-lost brother(iii) *John finished being sick when he took the medication(iv) *John finished swimming

VIII Ambiguity with ‘almost’

The adverb almost has different effects with Activities and Accomplishments (Morgan, 1969). Consider the examples below:

(22) (i) John almost swam(ii) John almost built a kite

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The example in (22i), an Activity predicate,entails that John did not, in fact, swim. The example in (22ii), an Accomplishment, has two interpretations (i.e. readings): a) John had the intention of building a kite but changed his mind and did nothing at all; b) John did begin work on the kite and he almost but not quite finished it.

IX ‘ed in an hour’ entails ‘ was ing during that hour’ This criterion has already been discussed being related to the third test. This entailment sets apart Achievements from Accomplishments. For many achievement expressions the time-span adverbial such as ‘in an hour’ is understood as ‘after -amount of time’. This is not true of accomplishments. If ‘John built a kite in an hour’ is true, then it is true that he ‘was building the kite during that hour’ . With achievements, therefore, the time indicated by the time-span adverbial is calculated from a contextually given reference point,while with accomplishments it is calculated from the beginning of the eventuality itself.

X Co-occurrence with attentively, carefully

Ryle (1949:150) observed that adverbs like studiously, attentively, carefully, obediently, vigilantly, etc are semantically anomalous with ‘purely lucky achievement’ verbs such as: find a penny, realize the truth, discover, spot, notice, etc. These adverbs (as a subset of the ones under the stativity tests in (I) presuppose a volitional goal-oriented activity. Important in the previous syntagm is the word ‘activity’. As far as ‘lucky achievements’ are concerned they are not prefaced by any ‘activity’ (or intentional subservient activity) and hence clash with such adverbs as given above.

(23) *Max attentively discovered the solution carefully found a unicorn

2.5. Remarks on Situation Types Categories As can be noticed from the above, these criteria mostly distinguish subsets of the

four categories set up by Vendler (1957.1967) rather than determining a single category. As appropriately mentioned, the syntactic tests given for distinguishing the four categories do not give consistent results for the full range of verb(phrases).

According to Dowty (1979:65) ‘the defect of previous studies of the Aristotelian verb classification has been that only a few examples from each category are discussed’.

Moreover, there is agreement among linguists and philosophers of language that the grammatical/syntactic tests distinguishing the situation types are directly based on their semantics.

Another important point is that the classification into categories is not and cannot be limited to the lexical level i.e. the verb, but, rather, higher syntactic units are to be taken into consideration when identifying a situation type. This idea is supported by the lexical ambiguities that may occur at the sentence level.

There are cases when one and the same verb, depending on the context, can be read as an Activity or Accomplishment verb, State or Achievement verb etc. We illustrate the contribution of arguments and adjuncts to the aspectual recategorization of

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a situation with several examples borrowed from Dowty (1979), Filip (1999) and Rothstein (2004). We provide several examples below:

a) first and foremost, while describing the criteria distinguishing among the different categories we noticed that some of the examples were equally felicitous with in and for adverbials (Fillmore’s (1971, apud Dowty, 1979:61) . The examples below are cases where verb phrases can be read either as an activity or as an accomplishment.

(24) (i) He read a book in/for an hour (ii) She combed her hair for/in five minutes- (iii) John built a kite for/in an hour

The examples below illustrate an activity verb of motion behaving like an

accomplishment predication if it occurs with either a locative of destination (i.e. goal) or with an adverb of extent, as in (25i) below:

(25) (i) John ran a mile(ii) John ran to the park

The examples in (25) meet all the requirements for an accomplishment reading, the entailments included.This phenomenon is not restricted to verbs of motion, as Dowty remarks (1979:61): ‘Look at, for example is normally an activity, but it has a familiar ‘special sense’ in which it is an accomplishment’

(26) I haven’t finished looking at your term paper yet, but I’ll try to finish it tonight so we can discuss it tomorrow.

According to the tests above, only accomplishments may occur as complements of ‘finish’.

Consider also the examples below where the contribution of an adverbial (Mourelatos, 1978) accounts for the aspectual recategorization of a state into an event:

(27) a). John hates liars b). John has hated liars three times in his life (three occasions of hating = event pred.)

b) accomplishment verbs and achievement verbs behave like activities if an indefinite plural direct object or a mass noun direct object is substituted for the (in)definite singular one (Dowty 1979:62):

(28) (i) John ate a bag of popcorn in an hour(ii) John ate popcorn (*in) for an hour(iii) John built that kite in an hour(iv) John built kites (*in) for an hour

(29) (i) John discovered the buried treasure in his yard in (*for) two days(ii) John discovered fleas on his dog (*in) for 2 days

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Moreover, if an indefinite plural occurs as subject of an achievement, the sentence is acceptable with durative adverbials (i.e. it has the properties of a sentence with an activity predicate):

(28) (i) *John discovered that quaint little village for years(ii) Tourists discovered that quaint little village for years

c) Intransitive activity verbs can occur in transitive resultative constructions, which are aspectually derived accomplishments (Rothstein, 2004):

(34) (i) At the opening of the new parliament building, the crowd cheered the huge gates open

(ii) Mary drank John under the table / sick / dizzy

It is equally true that we come across examples where these category ‘shifts’ are not available. A nice example is the one suggested by Filip (1999). In the examples below, both verbs (wheeze and croak) are characterized as ‘sound emission verbs’ and process-denoting (Levin &Rappaport-Hovav, 1995). Nevertheless, it is only one of them that can be ’fitted’ into the direction-motion construction, qualifying as accomplishment:

(29) (i) The elevator wheezed to the seventh floor.(ii)*The frogs croaked to the pond.

The examples above suggest that the classes pertain to syntactic units and not lexical ones. Verkuyl (1972, 1989:40 among others) remarks: ‘… aspect is not a matter settled at the verbal level. I propose that aspect be “taken away” from the verb and be assigned to higher levels of sentential structure: first of all, to the VP because this node dominates the verb and the object, and subsequently to the S(entence) because the nature of the subject appears to be a determinant of aspect as well. So the basic idea is that the verb needs to be specified as to its having a specific meaning element engaged in the composition of aspect, but this feature cannot be identified with aspect itself, because aspect is to be considered a complex sentential property.` (Verkuyl, 1972)

This remark runs along the remark made by Smith (1991:20) that ’….situation types are realized by constellations of lexical morphemes consisting of the verb and its arguments, including its subject. The verb is central to the situation type, but it is not the only factor of importance. The value of a constellation depends on the presence of complements, directional and other types, and on the nominals that appear…’ (Smith (1991)).

What all these statements amount to, actually, is that the evaluation of a situation type is valid at the level of the sentence, since the nature of NPs in subject and object position influence aspectual interpretation .

The examples above suggest that shifts in eventuality type are to a large extent systematic and predictable on the basis of the inherent lexical meaning of verbs, on the one hand, and the meaning of contextual factors that induce the shift, on the other hand. The assumption that the inherent lexical semantic properties (=LCS) of individual verbs

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lie at the basis of such shifts is supported by the observation that in many cases the expected shift does not occur, and the combination of a verb with a certain eventuality type shifter results in ungrammaticality or anomaly. Certain verbal predicates are always associated with a given eventuality type and cannot be integrated into the meaning of a construction that requires a verbal predicate of a different eventuality type.

All these facts led linguists to look into the ‘internal’ causes that could accurately account for these ‘meanings’ as well as for the aspectual properties of the various kinds of verbs.

2.6 Approaches to the semantics of eventuality types

The Vendlerian classification was further developed within tense logic, event semantics, and lexical decomposition (informally illustrated when we introduced the non-stativity tests).

These approaches assume that eventuality types are distinguished from one another by certain basic semantic concepts from which languages draw in constructing lexical meanings. The three main directions pursued will be :

(a) the temporal structure of eventuality types which accounts for the particular entailments and for the distribution of aspectual markers and temporal adverbials. b) characterization of eventuality types in the logic of part-whole relations, i.e. the ways in which an eventuality as a whole stands in relation to its parts c) lexical decomposition of predicates.

The approaches that base the classification primarily on temporal criteria, on abstract properties of time points and intervals are known as the tense logic approaches to the category of aspect (Bennett and Partee, 1972/1978; Dowty, 1972,1977,1979; Bennett, 1977, 1981; Taylor, 1977; and others). By making use of time points and intervals, linguists devised a very important temporal property of eventualities: the [+/-subinterval property].

Activity verbs for instance, such as run in the park, laugh, sleep, push a cart evince the subinterval property. Informally, if an activity is true at an interval of time, then it is true at every subinterval of that interval“Subinterval verb phrases have the property that if they are the main verb phrase of a sentence which is true at some interval of time I, then the sentence is true at every subinterval of I including every moment of time in I. Examples of subinterval verb phrases are: walk, breathe, walk in the park, push a cart ” ((Bennett and Partee,1972:17).

Vendler ’s homogeneity property closely corresponds to the subinterval property: The subinterval property is intended to distinguish states and activities (which evince the subinterval property) from accomplishments and achievements. (which do not evince it).

b) characterization of eventuality types in the logic of part-whole relations, i.e. the ways in which an eventuality as a whole stands in relation to its parts. .

The logic of part-whole relation is used in event semantics approaches to the theory of aspect. Approaches within event semantics take events or eventualities as basic entities in the domain of discourse, along with individuals and times (Mourelatos,

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1978, 1981, Bach, 1981,1986a,1986b; Parsons,1985, 1990; Hinrichs,1985; Krifka,1986,1989,1992; Pustejovsky, 1988a, 1988b, Zucchi, 1993,and others).

Bach (1981), following Mourelatos (1978) proposes that at least some of the properties of eventuality types can be understood in terms of parallels between verbal and nominal expressions that pertain to their ‘part ’ structure, that is, to the ways in which an entity as a whole stands in relation to its parts. This approach to the classification of nominal/verbal predicates is inspired by the theories of mereology, or the logic of part- whole relations, and has gained a lot of prominence within event semantics.

The relation between a whole and its parts is defined by two properties: subdivisibility (homogeneity) versus anti-subdivisibility and additivity (or cumulativity) versus anti-additivity.

States and activities/processes pattern together in having homogeneous, non-quantized reference, just like mass nouns and bare plurals. They have divisive reference (e.g. just like any part of gold is gold, so parts of being sick qualify as being sick and parts of walking are walking) and cumulative reference (parts of gold added to parts of gold amount to a larger quantity of gold; parts of walking/being sick added to parts of walking/being sick add up to being larger intervals of walking and being sick).

Events (i.e. accomplishments and achievements) have non-homogeneous, quantized reference, just like countable nouns. They are anti-subdivisible ( smaller parts of a table - its legs, top, etc – are not the table; similarly, no proper subpart of the event of building a cabin can be an event of the same kind) and anti-additive (several tables, if added, do not form one and the same larger table; similarly, two events of building each a cabin do not make a larger event of building a cabin)

c) lexical decomposition of predicates. The assumption behind predicate decomposition is that at some level of representation the meaning of verbs has internal structure. Dowty (1972/1979) puts forth the hypothesis that verb types differ in their conceptual complexity, which is describable in terms of semantic components such as DO, BECOME /COME TO BE or CAUSE. Other linguists followed suit, such as Rappaport and Levin, (1988) ,Parsons (1990), Pustejovschi (1991), Hale and Keyser (1993), Ramchand (2002) to mention a few.

In order to make explicit the aspects of meaning relevant to predicate decomposition, Rappaport and Levin (1988) employ the notion of lexical conceptual structures (LCSs). As already mentioned, these structures provide specifications of the verb's meaning and the arguments of the verb are indicated in the representations as variables . LCSs should be viewed as the lexical part of the verb's meaning. Any changes in argument structure of a verb will engender semantic changes at the level of LCS.

The verb itself decomposes into more elementary predicates linked by various relations. These elementary predicates, such as BECOME, CAUSE, DO, BE, may occur over a large number of verbs that are semantically related. The argument places (i.e. the participants in the event) of these predicative constituents are held by variables (i.e. letters like x, y, z which stand for the syntactic NPs). The arguments are thus variables occurring in substructures of LCSs. Here are a few examples:

(39) a. PUT: [x Does smth] Cause [y Come [to Be at z]]] (x does something which causes y to come to be at location z)

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b. KILL: [x Does smth] Cause [y Come [to Become not alive]]] (x does something which causes y to become dead)

3.0 The Ontology of situationsIn this subchapter we shall try to offer a comprehensive syntactic and semantic characterization of basic-situation types, the central stereotypes for each of the identified subtypes, taking into consideration the insights of the three influential approaches mentioned in the previous subchapter as well as the two component theory of aspect developed by Smith (1991). In the two component theory the composite nature of aspectual meaning is essential, since aspectual meaning/interpretation pertains to the sentence that presents information about situation type )lexical information and viewpoint (grammatical information) To the above mentioned situation types we also introduce a fifth situation type identified by linguists, namely semelfactives. Semelfactives are represented by expressions like: knock, hit, kick, cough, etc. and in Smith’s view (1991) they are considered as a subtype of activities. Sometimes they are treated as a special subclass of Achievements, that is, instantaneous events that are not telic.

3.1 Conceptual features of the situation typesThe following semantic features are assumed to distinguish between the situation

types, these features functioning as shorthand for the cluster of properties that distinguishes them.

The first feature that is fundamentul in the characterization of situation types is the feature [ stative]. Cognitively this distinction between ‘stasis’ and ‘motion’ (change) is fundamental. The feature of stativity bifurcates situation types into the classes of states and non-states (activities and events. States are the simplest of the situation types. From a temporal point of view, they consist only of undifferentiated moments, without endpoints.

The distinction between states and non-states (activities and events) is reflected in language: in English a non-stative situation occurs, happens, takes place (i.e. culminates, in Parsons’ terms) while a state holds. The pro-verb do generally associates with non-states rather than states. Linguists make this distinction at the level of the lexical entry of the verb by assuming that only non-stative predicates have an ‘event’ variable in their lexical entry.

Non-stative situations form the natural class of ‘events’ (activities and events proper). As shown by Ross (1972) non-statives are ‘doings’; they are dynamic, involving causation (which includes both agentive and non-agentive subjects), activity and change. They consist of stages/phases rather than undifferentiated moments. The successive changes of Activities and Accomplishments over time reflect dynamism, as do the single stages of Achievements and Semelfactives. Accordingly, since stages characterize events, the property [+stage] corresponds to the feature [+dynamic, i.e. –stative].

The feature [telic] goes as far back as Aristotle’s notions of kinesis (performance) and energia. Situation types are characterized as telic or atelic.

Telic eventualities are directed towards a goal/outcome, i.e. they have an inherent culmination point. When the goal is reached , a definite change of state occurs

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and the event is complete i.e. it attains a final/resultant state. The goal may be intrinsic to the event, in this case constituting its natural endpoint. A good example is the verb ‘break’ which is an inherently telic verb (John broke the stick in a second) (Ramchand, 1999:4). It follows that telic events are finite/bounded, i.e. the final point must be specific.

It is important to mention here that the existence of telicity does not necessarily imply the presence of an internal argument (a syntactic object) and conversely the existence of an internal argument does not imply telicity:

(30) a) John stood up in a secondb) John pushed the cart for hours

In the first example telicity is rendered by means of the particle ‘up’, the verb itself being an intransitive/atelic verb. In the second example, the entire sentence qualifies aspectually as an activity although the verb requires a direct object (an internal argument).

Another important point is that the category of telic events is not limited to events that are under the control of an agent. For instance, the event of ‘a rock falling to the ground’ is telic: the goal is reached when the rock is on the ground (Smith, 1991:29), i.e. the rock has reached a final state; the final point is made specific by the presence of the expression ‘to the ground’.

The examples above suggest that telicity may be triggered by the presence of different syntactic expressions. Of the four Vendlerian classes, Accomplishments and Achievements are characterized as telic.

Atelic eventualities are simply processes, which are realized as soon as they begin. Atelic eventualities have no (inherent) endpoint, but rather an arbitrary final point: they can stop or be terminated at any time: for example if one doesn’t continue running, one automatically ceases running. Activities (i.e. processes) and semelfactives are atelic.

The feature [durative] also categorizes idealized situations: some take time (i.e. activities , accomplishments are durative), other are instantaneous (i.e. Achievements and Semelfactives). This feature has sometimes been ignored by some scholars, being considered as an inessential feature of eventualities (e.g. Mourelatos 1978, Dowty, 1986).

According to Smith (1991) the feature of ‘duration’ is relevant in the description of situation types since in many languages it is grammaticized overtly or covertly. Mittwoch (1979) presents strong evidence for a durative feature in the grammar of English. The property of duration is explicitly indicated by adverbials (for pharses) and main verbs (continue/keep). The imperfective viewpoint is also a linguistic correlate of duration, since imperfective focusses on the internal stages of durative situations. With instantaneous situations, those that lack an interval, the imperfective may focus on preliminary or resultative stages.

The examples in (24-29) above point out to the fact (cf. Smith 1997) that the aspectual interpretation of a sentence is compositional. This suggests, as already hinted at, that the aspectual center of a sentence is the verb but it is not the only factor of importance, since idealized situation types are associated with verb constellations.

The suggestion put forth by Smith (and other linguists as we have seen) is that the features discussed are actually intrinsic to the verbs themselves and these basic

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features may be overridden in combination with other forms. We present below examples (borrowed from Smith 1991:73) of the inherent aspectual value of a few verbs with the examples of the sentences in which they occur:

(31) walk[-telic] Mary walkedwalk the dog: v[-telic] + N[count]= VP[-telic]walk to the park: v[-telic] +PP[directional] = VP[+telic]build (+telic] John built a house

build the house: V[+telic] + N[count] = VP [+telic]build houses: V[+telic] + N[mass] = VP [-telic]

In what follows we shall attempt to offer a comprehensive description of eventuality types taking into account their semantic and syntactic properties as highlighted by the different theories and scholars previously introduced.

3.2.Semantic and syntactic properties of situation types:3.2.1 The stative situation type

3.2.1. States are stable situations. Typical, basic level states are [know the answer], [be tall], [desire] [be available], etc. States are characterized by the features [+stative] [+durative]. The feature [telic] is not relevant for states since they have been characterized by scholars as being unbounded and having an abstract atemporal quality (Bach 1981). Because of the latter properties states are hard to individuate; they are uncountable. States are verbs which do not denote a change or an event with internal structure. Intuitively, stative predicates predicate a quality or property of an individual. They can be considered as properties or relations disguised as verbs (Guenthner, Hoepelman and Rohrer, 1978); they include concrete and abstract properties of all kinds: possession, location, belief and other mental states, dispositions, etc. Stative predicates are also characterized as being qualitatively homogeneous (subdivisible and additive), that is to say that stative predications have the subinterval property. The general temporal schema for states consists of an undifferentiated period as in (32) below:

(32) (I) (F)

The line represents the interval (period) during which a state holds; it is not divided into stages. The lack of stages can be reinterpreted by characterizing states as lacking a processual part ( Galton 1984, Hoeksema 1984, Giorgi and Pianesi, 1998)). The presence or absence of a processual part in the actional properties of predicates is detected by the continuous tense criterion used by Vendler in his classification.

The initial (I) and final (F) points are within parentheses, to indicate that they are not part of the state itself. This can be rephrased by adopting the feature [-definite], used by Galton 1984, Hoeksema 1984, to characterize this property of states.

The schema also reflects that the state holds consistently during the entire interval, since states may be judged as true at any moment of time within that interval. This property can be stated as follows (Taylor, 1977):

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(33) If is a state, then (x) is true at an interval I just in case (x) is true at all moments within I

To exemplify, if John owns a dog for a week there is no moment throughout this interval during which he did not own that dog. States may be judged as true at any moment in time because they are not dependent on time (i.e. they are atemporal). As states do not involve change, they appear to be ‘simpler’ in terms of their temporal constituency than activities or events which need at least two moments of time for their evaluation. If we were to decompose the meaning of a state predicate like ‘own’ in ‘John owns the house’ (Dowty, 1979) we would have the following representation:

(34) John owns the house own(j, h)

Some scholars (e.g. Dowty, 1979) assume that states (as an eventuality type) enter into the conceptual structure of the other aspectual classes (activities, accomplishments and achievements).

Given the temporal properties of states, sentences with stative predicates display all the syntactic non-stative tests. They do not appear in constructions that directly assume agency and dynamism:

(i) states are odd in imperatives, (*Know Greek!) (ii) states do not accept agent-oriented adverbs like willingly, deliberately, since their subjects cannot be interpreted as agents (*He knew Greek deliberately), (iii) states cannot be embedded under ‘force’ and ‘persuade (*I forced her to know Greek), (iv) states do not neutrally allow the ‘do’ test (*What she did was know Greek) or the ‘progressive’ (v) states do not naturally presuppose temporal and spatial coordinates (*When and where does he know Greek ?).

Given their abstract quality, they are uncountable. This is why cardinal numerals do not occur in contexts of state predications (*He knew Greek three times). Further evidence for the ‘mass’ properties of state predicates is provided by nominalizations of state predicates (hatred, love, knowledge, etc) which are uncountable and do not allow the indefinite article or cardinal numerals. These nominalizations will perfectly collocate with mass quantifiers like much/little (There was little love lost among themselves). 3.2.2. Scholars have acknowledged that we can distinguish between different types of states; some of these types are basic-level states and there are also two derived stative predicates The important difference among basic stative predicates (e.g. Carlson, 1977, Dowty, 1979, Smith, 1991, etc) is brought about by the types of referents to which they apply. Predicates may apply to individuals (kinds of objects or objects) or to stages of individuals.8 English distinguishes syntactically between permanent, non-temporary

8 Stages of individuals are thought of as ‘temporal slices/manifestations” of individuals, their actual/concrete manifestation

in space and at particular times. Stages could be viewed as (temporally/spatially bound) parts of objects/kinds in an underlying

mereological logic. In general, verbs that may take the progressive form refer to stages, while prototypical state verbs may predicate

of objects and kinds but not stages.

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states (know, desire, be tall, be widespread) and temporary states (be available, be in the garden).

Carlson argues that the class of predicates that denote relatively stable, non-transitory inherent properties apply to individuals (objects or kinds): [be altruistic] [be a teacher], [be intelligent] [be widespread], while stative predicates that denote transitory properties apply to stages of individuals [be available] [be in the garden now] [be drunk]. The predicates assert a quality or property of an individual as a spatio-temporal whole, or of an individual’s limited spatio-temporal properties. Dynamic predicates (i.e activities, accomplishments, achievements, semelfactives) are characteruzed as being stage-level predicates inherently.

Below is a list of examples of some predicates that apply to stages and some that apply to objects/kinds; as the examples show, most nominal predicates apply to objects /kinds, while the majority of prepositional phrases (PPs) in predicate position apply to stages (especially the locatives). Adjectives appear to constitute a mixed group, with the majority applying to objects:

(34) Stages Individuals (Objects/Kinds)

run into the room know how to dancefind a book have ears

(be) in the next room (be) a turtle/an orphan(be) present/available (be) intelligent/tall(be) on top of the house weigh 250 kg(be) drunk know French(be) running about be sick (mentally)be on top of the house be widespread

Classical stative predicates [know], [desire] [believe], [like], [be altruistic] [own] turn out to be predicates over individuals not predicates over stages of individuals i.e. they are basic individual level predicates.

What enables one to assert a stative predication is our ‘total experience’ with previous stages of an individual.

In Dowty’s (1979:179) own words’ ‘John knows French’ is made true not by John doing something at that moment, but by past (presumably future) occasions of John-stages having stage-properties of speaking French.’ To quote Dowty (1979) again ‘The usefulness of such predicates as know, like, believe, intelligent, soluble, fragile (…..) in language is that they indicate a potential for having ‘stage’ properties of a certain kind at some future or hypothetical time. And this potential exists at any one moment during the whole interval of their truth as much as at any other moment’. Dowty (1979:179)

Given that the means for expressing the individual-level generalized predication as well as the stage-level predication exists in the language, and given that the individual level statement in effect pragmatically entails that the stage-level statement is true, most predicates in the language (with a few exceptions) can be used with both types of referents.

This is true of generic predications (Tigers eat meat/Tigers are striped) and habitual predications (Franny, my cat, eats carrots/ He writes novels) which are semantically stative precisely because they denote properties that hold of individuals or patterns /generalizations over events rather than specific situations.

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As Dowty (1979) observes: ‘ Even when we predicate them of an individual at a particular time, it is really not a property that individual’s current stage has at that moment that makes them true, but our ‘total experience’ with previous stages of that individual. We can truthfully assert that John is in the habit of smoking if we have identified a “suitable number” of past occasions on which John’s-stage-smoking was true. Such a broad and pragmatically vague interval presumably also includes a number of future instances of John’s stage property of smoking”. Dowty (1979:179)

As we have seen, stereotypic states like the ones mentioned above are like this as well. Therefore, what enables one to assert the existence of a property that characterizes an individual is one’s total experience of the individual rather than the individual’s behaviour at one particular time. Just like basic (individual) level state predicates, habituals/generics express dispositions, indicating a potential for having stage properties. Given that generic and habitual sentences may be formed of verb constellations that apply to stages of individuals, i.e. are non-stative (stage-level) at the basic level of classification, such sentences will be considered as derived statives (Smith 1991:40)

So far we have identified two subtypes of basic stative predicates: (a) individual level state predicates that denote permanent, non-transitory

properties of individuals, that is entities in their total spatio-temporal manifestations, represented in English by verbs:

(i) of possession or other property denoting (own, have, possess, belong, cost, weigh, measure),(ii) verbs denoting abstract and concrete properties (be altruistic, be tall, be intelligent, be widespread, be extinct),(iii) belief and other mental states (believe, know, think (give opinion), hope, fear), (iv) verbs of physical perception (see, hear, taste, feel, etc),

(v) emotive predicates (love, hate, like, dislike, rejoice, despise, want, desire, etc)

To this basic subtype of states we add two types of derived statives, namely generics and habituals that predicate over individuals (kinds of objects and objects, ) and hence, are also thought of in terms of individual level predicates.

(b) stage level state predicates (be angry, be available, be in Chicago, etc) which denote temporary states (momentary stage-predicates in Dowty’s terms) and apply to a temporal and spatial ‘stage’ (manifestation) of an individual. The intervals at which ‘stage’ predicates are true are shorter, have distinct boundaries and may have truth conditions that differentiate among parts of the interval. This type of statives is compatible with expressions of simple duration and punctuality: He was angry for an instant, She was hungry at noon.

According to Dowty (1979:180) these two classes ‘can be true at moments and are true at an interval if and only if they are true at all moments within that interval’. In other words, they obey Taylor’s postulate stated in (33) above.

(c) a third subtype of statives is identified by Dowty (1979:178) as ‘interval statives’, since their truth condition requires an interval larger than a moment. This subtype of statives includes verb constellations of position and location (with verbs like sit, be, crouch, lie, perch, sprawl, stand) which have properties that distinguishes them from the other predicates expressing temporary states. In English these verbs are unique among stative verbs in allowing the progressive although, just like bona fide

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states, they involve no agency (they may occur with inanimate subjects) or change. The examples below are borrowed from Dowty (1979:173):

(35) a) The socks lie/are lying under the bedb) New Orleans lies /??is lying at the mouth of the Mississippi Riverc) One corner of the piano rests/is resting on the bottom stepd) That argument rests/?? is resting on an invalid assumption

The progressive in these sentences has a stative interpretation (actually they denote a temporary state), whereas usually the progressive is associated with an active interpretation. When these verbs occur with human subject nominal phrases their use in the progressive can be explained in terms of ‘intentionality or ‘volitional control (e.g. She’s resting on the sofa) (Dowty 1979).

The progressive with the sentences in (35) above appears to be subject to certain semantic restrictions, as can be seen by comparing the progressive examples above. The conclusion is that the progressive is acceptable with these verbs just to the degree that the subject denotes a moveable object, or to be more exact, an object that has recently moved in a slightly different situation. Given this restriction, the acceptability of the progressive can also depend on the context as well as the subject and verb:

(36) a) ??Two trees were standing in the field (strange in isolation)b) After the forest fire, only two trees were still standing

Remark: (i) Perception verbs (see,), verbs of feeling (like, love) and some verbs of mental states (know, understand) that are stative at the basic level of classification, may also have an achievement interpretation in the context of adverbs like ‘ suddenly’, or completive adverbials. Compare:

(37) I saw the cityhall from my windowSuddenly, I saw a star.I like music.I liked him in a second.

(ii) Perception verbs like smell/taste/feel have the same form but distinct syntactic behaviour when they refer to a state or an activity: intransitive when qualifying as state, transitive when denoting activity. The verbs see and hear, on the other hand, appear in pairs of stative and active perception verbs: see:look at/watch; hear:listen to.

(38) I can taste salt in my porridgeI am tasting the soup to see if it needs any salt

3.2.2 The process situation type

3.2.2.The term ‘process’ has been chosen to refer both to activities associated with human subjects ( external causation) (he swam/ran/slept/strolled in the park, she ate for an hour) and activities which are not cases of human agency ( the ball rolled/moved, it rained for hours the jewels glittered).

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Processes are atelic, durative, dynamic events. The process situation type has no goal, no culminatiom or natural final point: their termination is merely cessation of activity, i.e. they have an arbitrary final point. Hence, Processes ‘stop’ or ‘terminate’ but they never ‘finish’. Processes have dynamic, successive, homogeneous stages and take time, that is, the stereotypic Process occurs over an interval longer than a moment. The abstract temporal schema for processes is given below. In the abstract temporal schema ‘I ‘stands for the initial point, Farb stands for the arbitrary endpoint, while the dots represent the successive stages (indefinite changes):

(39) Temporal schema for ProcessesI……………Farb

Since processes are characterized as being homogeneous there is no difference in kind between a proper part and the entire situation. (i.e. processes are subdivisible and additive).

For instance, if ‘John walked in the park’ for an interval, his walking during several minutes of the interval also counts as walking. Vendler characterizes this property of processes as follows: ‘Activities go on in time in a homogeneous way; any part of the process is of the same nature as the whole’ (1967:133).

The remarks above actually show that just like states, processes are subinterval verb phrases obeying the postulate below (Taylor (1977)):

(40) If is a process, then if (x) is true at I, then (x) is true at all subintervals of I which are larger than a moment

As in the case of states, processes behave like uncountable nouns. They cannot be counted, being cumulative/additive and subdivisible. Process nominalizations have mass noun properties co-occurring with indefinite mass quantifiers such as: much, little, enough, no:

(41) For hours there was little/no/much running/playing in the park

The most general activity verb seems to be DO; processes are doings, so DO might be viewed as a common component in the lexical conceptual structure (=LCS) of process predicates. (Dowty, 1979). The semantic/conceptual represention of a process sentence is as in (42) below below:

(42) John walked DO (walk) (j)

Given their semantic/conceptual and temporal properties, process predicates pass all the non-stativity tests mentioned in the previous subchapters, such as:

(i) compatibility with the progressive(ii) appear in pseudo-cleft constructions with the auxiliary do(iii) as complements of ‘stop’(iv) they naturally co-occur with period adverbials: for x- time, all summer/morning/day, and as complements of spend -amount of time:

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(v) the entailment from the progressive form “x is -ing ” to the simple form “x has -ed ” is valid; i.e. the imperfective process sentence entails the perfective sentence:

(42) The dog was chasing a car entails

The dog chased a car

Agentive process verb phrases (with animate, agentive subjects) occur as :

(i) complements of force/persuade, (ii) imperatives(iii) with agent oriented adverbs: deliberately, willingly, carefully

Non-agentive processes do not occur with agent –oriented adverbs or as complements of force/persuade:

(43) (i)*John persuaded/forced the refrigerator to run (ii) *The refrigerator deliberately ran

(iii) The refrigerator is running

When we discussed state predications we argued that predicates may assert a quality or property of an individual as a spatio-temporal whole, or it may assert an individual’s limited spatio-temporal properties. Since processes, as we have seen, may take temporal and spatial arguments to their main verb they fall into the class of stage-level predications.

Process sentences consist of verb constellations presenting a process situation. The verb constellation may consist of: (a) an atelic verb and compatible complements (if any), (e.g. push a cart ,play chess/the piano, laugh, sleep, smile, think about, dream, walk in the park, run along the beach, enjoy, etc.), b) atelic durative verb with a complement that is cumulative or uncountable. These qualify as multiple-event processes. Examples would be: eat cherries, write letters, drink wine, etc. Multiple event processes may also consist of iterations, repetitions of instantaneous events, such as achievements and semelfactives: cough for five minutes, revolve, find crabgrass in the garden all summer, etc.

In English we also have other means to change the telicity of a constellation; one particular possibility is the type of preposition employed: e.g. read the book vs read at the book; paint the fence vs paint away at the fence. The telicity tests will show that the first member of the pair qualifies as telic (i.e. accomplishment) while the second member qualifies as atelic (process). The possibility of such events make the Process the most varied of situation types.

3.2.3. The event situation types (accomplishment and achievement)

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3.2.3. The term ‘event’ denotes those situation types that involve a product, upshot or outcome i.e. they involve a definite change of state. They are characterized by the feature [+telic].

According to Von Wright (1963:28): ‘The event itself is the change or transition from the state of affairs which obtains on the earlier occasion to the state which obtains on the later occasion. The event of ‘opening the window’, for instance, consists of a change from a state when the window is closed to a state when the window is open. Any event can be defined as a change of state, where the two states are of a particular form – one state is the negation of the other. An event is therefore a change from a state p to a state q, where p is non-q.’

As can be noticed, events, like processes, require at least two moments of time, i.e. an interval, to be evaluated; that is to say events, whether instantaneous or durative, take (some definite) time to be realized. Events are not ‘literally true or false for a period of time or even at a point in time’ but rather’ events take place in [a definite] period of time’ (Dowty, 1979 :74). Events are temporally complex; they do not have the subinterval property (i.e. they are not sub-divisible and additive) . Events (accomplishments and achievements alike) obey the following postulate (Taylor 1977):

(44) If is an event, then if (x) is true at I, then (x) is false at all subintervals of I

The property stated above says that an event must be evaluated for its truth-value over a single, particular interval but it cannot be true of any subinterval that make up the interval.

Events are compatible with adverbials of completion, i.e. ‘in-x time phrases ‘, and they freely and naturally take the ‘take x-time’ test.

Since they are true of particular (bounded) time intervals, events may have definite time and space coordinates identified by place and time adverbials, which show that events take place within time periods.

Given the temporal property stated above, events are heterogeneous or quantized (i.e. non-homogeneous) qualitatively and since they have boundaries (involve an outcome, product) they can be individuated, i.e. counted, co-occurring with cardinals, or frequency adverbs. Nominalizations of event predicates qualify as countable nouns. (e.g. The Vesuvius erupted once/three times last year/ There was an eruption of the Vesuvius last year.).

Since events temporally segment our experience in a definite way, they are undoubtedly stage-level predications, predicating about ‘temporal and spatial ‘stages/slices’ of individuals.

Events are divided up into accomplishments and achievements. With accomplishments the change of state is prepared (brought about, caused) by some activity/process, the change being the completion of the process: e.g. build a bridge, walk to school, repair a car, drink a glass of wine. Accomplishments are conceptualized as ‘durative’ events. The interval considered includes the process and the change of state it brings about. Therefore accomplishments are complex events, i.e they have other event types as their components. An accomplishment is a causal structure of type [e1 causes e2) where e1 is the (causing) activity/process while e2 is the resulting (change of) state.

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Achievements, on the other hand, focus on the change of state, backgrounding or simply leaving out the causing activity/process and the causing factor.: e.g. My father died. My father died (from his wounds) (in the end). Achievements are truly changes of state, they are ‘becomings’, they are all ‘culmination’ and are conceptualized as ‘instantaneous’.3.2.3.1 AccomplishmentsAs already mentioned accomplishments consist of a process and an outcome, a change of state, having successive stages in which the process advances to its conclusion. The successive stages of accomplishments are characterized by Dowty (1979) as ‘definite changes of state’ which account for the lack of the subinterval property with these situation types, i.e. they are anti-subdivisible (no proper part of an event is of the same kind as the event).

Dowty (1979) dubbed accomplishments as ‘complex changes of state’. Accomplishments result in a new state. For instance, [build a house] includes the various stages of house building as well as its completion. The relation between the process and the outcome of an Accomplishment is non-detachable. If the outcome of an Accomplishment is reached , it follows that the process occurred, i.e. if [John build a house] occurs at an interval, then it is true that during that interval [John was building the house]. This entailment is stated informally in (45) below (Smith (1997):

(45) If event A occurs at interval A, then the process associated with A occurs during the internal stages of that interval.

This entailment can be stated with truth conditions for related perfective and imperfective accomplishment predications:

(46) If is an accomplishment verb then x -ed in y time entails x was -ing during that time

What the above statement asserts is that if ‘John wrote a report in an hour’ is true, then it is also true that ‘John was writing the report during that hour’. However, the opposite is not true: if a process occurs one cannot infer its outcome, i.e. ‘John is writing an essay’ does not entail ‘ John wrote an essay’.

The temporal schema of an Accomplishment is given in (47) below.( Smith 1991:49). The dots represent the successive internal stages. Fnat represents the natural final point, or completion, which represents the defining property of telic situation types. R represents the result state that obtains after the completion of the process:

(47) I…………….FNat <R>

Since Accomplishments conceptualize not only the change but also the process (i.e. causing factor) that brings about (causes) the resultant state, it has been assumed that semantically, accomplishments can be interpreted as including 3 abstract predicates, namely DO, CAUSE and BECOME. CAUSE is viewed as bisentential (i.e. logically connecting two sentences (propositions). Its subject clause expresses the process (the ‘DOING’) that leads to the change of state, while the object clause expresses the resultant state.

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(48) John drew the circle DO(j ) CAUSE [BECOME (exist (c))]

There are good reasons (morphological, semantic and syntactic) to assume that DO, CAUSE and BECOME should be considered significant conceptual components of accomplishment situations.

(a) First of all in English there are a large number of causative/inchoative affixes such as #ize, #ify , #en, be#, en# that form [+Telic] verbs from adjectives or nouns (e.g. fertilefertilize; solidsolidify, height→ heighten, broad→broaden, slave→enslave, etc), as well as the existence of conversion phenomena (bottle to bottle (the wine); saddleto saddle (the horse); cool →to cool, where DO, CAUSE, BECOME are lexically incorporated. Many cases may be categorized as either accomplishments or achievements, depending on whether the process is seen as intrinsically related to the outcome. The verbal prefixes re# (to do over again) or pre# are also telic, requiring situation types with natural endpoints.: reopen, reevaluate, etc.; State, Activity and Semelfactive verbs do not take this prefix: *resneeze, *rebelieve, *relaugh, *reknock, etc, nor do verbs with re- appear in atelic constellations:

John rethought the problem vs *John rethought that 2+2 = 5 (Smith 1991:234) b) Secondly, Ryle (1949:151) observed that durative events are caracterized

semantically as being ‘bipartite’ in a way that Activities and Achievements are not. In using an Accomplishment predicate ‘We are asserting that some state of affair obtains over and above that which consists in the performance, if any, of the subservient task activity. ……..for a doctor to effect a cure, his patient must both be treated (task activy) and be well again (result state)’ ( Ryle (1949:151).

c)Thirdly, English has constructions which lexicalize both the causing activity and the resultant state. These constructions are result constructions exemplified in (49) (borrowed from Smith 1991, Cornilescu 1986) and verb plus particle constructions exemplified in (50):

(49) The sheriff shot the man deadThe wind shaped the hills into conesThe maid swept the floor clean(Her sweeping the floor caused the floor to become clean)

(50) throw something away/down/aside/up/input/send/throw/drive/call away

We may also come across monomorphemic accomplishments that specify the associated activity that brings about the change (drown, electrocute, strangle, hang, poison (‘use poison to cause someone to become dead).

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Accomplishments are ambiguous with the adverb ‘almost’. The ambiguity only occurs with accomplishment situations and thus confirms the ‘bipartite ‘ structure of Accomplishments situations.

(51) John almost opened the doorAlmost [John open the door]Become (the door is almost open)

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On one reading the subject John had the intention of opening the door but did not perform the activity, on the second reading John began to open the door and he almost but not quite finished opening it, i.e.the door wasn’t quite open.

Another proof for the bipartite nature of Accomplishments is the ability of accomplishment predicates to occur with for-phrases, and the expression spend x time, however marginally. This can be accounted for only by acknowledging the presence of a process phase in their temporal make-up. Actually, the entire sentence qualifies as a derived process predicate. Achievement predicates are excluded in these contexts:

(52) (?)John built a kite for two hours John did two hours of kite-building(?)Mary played a sonata for an hour Mary did two hours of sonata-playing John spent an hour building a kite Mary spent an hour playing a sonata

Actually, in English, for-phrases, may create ambiguity with some Accomplishment predicates. (Binnick 1986 apud Crainiceanu 1997)):

(53) The sheriff of Nottingham jailed Robin Hood for four years

On one reading, the act of jailing Robin Hood lasted for four years, while on the second reading Robin Hood was sentenced to four years in prison. In the first interpretation the adverbial refers to the process part while in the second to the result state.

The bipartite structure of Accomplishment situations also accounts for the fact that accomplishments may naturally co-occur with both ‘stop’ and ‘finish’. Given the heterogeneous structure of accomplishments it is but natural that the entailments differ:

(54) (i) John finished building the house(ii) John stopped building the house

In (i) the entailment is that the activity reached its completion and the resultant state is the existence of the house. In (ii) the entailment is that we are not entitled to conclude that ‘John did build the house’, but only that he ‘was building’ a house, which he may or may not have finished. Achievement predicates are excluded from these contexts.

Given their temporal structure, Accomplishments, as observed by Dowty ‘do not take place (actually are not ’true’ or ‘false’) at a time’. Nevertheless, we may come across sentences where there is a verb constellation typical of a durative Accomplishment in the company of a momentary adverbial like at noon. According to Smith (1991:55) such sentences focus the beginning of the event: it is an inceptive presentation of an accomplishment. Such interpretations are also made possible with ‘super-lexical’ verbs such as [begin] [start].

(55) They walked to school at noon

Like processes, accomplishments are [+dynamic] and may be controllable (i.e. may have agentive subjects), hence they pass all the tests for non-stativity:

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a) occur in imperativesb) occur as complements of force/persuadec) co-occur with agent-oriented adverbs deliberately, carefullyd) appear in pseudo-cleft constructions with the auxiliary do

Accomplishment sentences consist of constellations that have: (a) telic, durative verbs and countable (quantized) arguments (see example 56 (i)); (b) atelic, durative verbs and directional complements, or with certain prepositions (see 56 (ii) and (iii); (c) atelic verb and resultative construction (see examples in 56(iv):

(56) (i) They drank a glass of beer and left (ii) The children walked to school (iii) The boy ran out (iv) She laughed herself silly/ The alarm clock ticked the baby awake

To conclude, the essential characteristics of Accomplishments are dynamism, duration, completion and non-detachability (i.e. the entailment relation between process and oucome/resultant state :e=e1 e2).

3.2.2.4 AchievementsAchievements are instantaneous, single-stage events that result in a change of

state. Achievements focus mainly on the change of state, simply leaving out or backgrounding the causing activity and causing factor. Examples of stereotypic achievements are : die, reach the top, win the race, arrive, leave, recognize, notice, find a penny, miss the target, lose the watch, remember, etc.

Even if some achievements may be preceded by some preparatory activity (e.g. land, die, reach the top, win the race, etc) this instantaneous event type does not conceptualize it. As Smith (1991:58) remarks: ‘The preliminary stages which may be associated with the change of state are conceptually detached from the event as such’.

The temporal schema (Smith 1991) of an achievement presents an event as consisting of a single stage, which constitutes the change of state as such. The initial and final points are represented as simultaneous:

(57) ….I F<R>…..

In the temporal schema diagram above R stands for the result of the change of state, while the dots represent preliminary and resultant stages. The existence of such preliminary stages accounts for the ability of some achievement predicates to occur in the progressive (e.g. He is dying. The plane was landing when the storm started.) Not all achievement predicates presuppose or imply preliminary stages (or a preparatory, ‘prelude’ process as Kearns (1991) puts it ).

The predicates that do no presuppose a preparatory process are known as ‘lucky achievements’ (find, recognize, discover, notice, lose, remember, etc) and they resist use in the progressive.

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It is interesting to mention here a group of verbs (known as degree or scalar predicates, Dowty 1979, Ramchand 2001) that do not inherently imply telicity, i.e. they describe a change of state/location as far as their argument is concerned but they need not entail the attainment of a final state. (e.g widen, harden, rise, fall, descend, roll, dry, cool, melt, etc). A gap can widen for hours but then it may close again; a balloon can rise without hitting the top of the sky. Such predicates are on the borderline between achievements and accomplishments. They may have an achievement interpretation or an accomplishment interpretation. These verbs will all occur in resultative constructions or in the context of prepositional phrases that would actually specify the final state.

(58) The baloon rose to the ceilingThe book fell downMary dried the cocoa beans dry

We have already mentioned that achievements are ‘becomings’ or simply changes of states, so the assumption is that their semantic/conceptual structure consists of the abstract predicate ‘BECOME” (become, come to be) (Dowty 1979) and the resultant state:

(59) The soup cooled BECOME (cool (s))lose somethingCOME not to know the location ofarrive at/reach’COME to be at a place

This analysis proves that achievements are more complex than states, incorporating them. The truth conditions for achievements make explicit the passage from the negation of the resultant state to its truth:

(60) BECOME (p) is true at t, if p is true at ti and false at ti-1

Morpho-syntactic evidence for the semantic/conceptual structure hypothesized above comes from the existence of regular word formation processes which derive achievements from adjectives. BECOME may be realized as a (possibly null) verbal affix: hardEN (BECOME (hard)), cool (BECOME (cool)).

The syntactic properties and the characteristic entailments of achievements follow from the fact that they do not conceptualize the causing factor simply involving a ‘single change of state’ (Dowty 1979).

As already mentioned, the entailments of Achievements differ from those of Accomplishments. If John built a kite in an hour is true, then it is true that John was building the kite during that hour. But from the truth of ‘John recognized his brother in a few minutes’ it does not follow that John was recognizing his brother throughout the period of a few minutes. Actually, the meaning of the time-span expression with achievements is ‘after a few minutes’. As we have seen, the same interpretation holds for activities. In short, with achievements and activities the time indicated by the time-span adverbial is calculated from a contextually given reference point, while with accomplishments it is calculated from the beginning of the eventuality itself. Schematically this difference in entailments can be rendered as follows (Dowty, 1979:59):

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(61) If is an accomplishment verb, then x ed in y time entails that x was ing during y time;If is an achievement verb, then ed in y time does not entail x was ing during y time.

The pattern of compatibility with expressions of completion and duration

distinguishes achievements from the other situation types. As we have seen completive adverbials (i.e. in X-time) allow an ingressive interpretation: the event occurs at the end of the interval. The imperfective viewpoint has the same effect, as do duration adverbials like slowly, quickly.

((62)) They reached the top in an hourThey slowly reached the topWe were reaching the top when the rain started

Perioad adverbials like ‘for x time’are not compatible with achievement predicates as such, if they do, we get a derived activity reading with what is known as ‘achievement in series’ (the subject/object NP plays an important role in the re-categorization, as the examples below indicate):

(63) *They reached the top for five minutes The firecracker exploded for five minutes* The bomb exploded for five minutes

Achievements are also incompatible with verbs expressing completion .Verbs like ‘finish’ or ‘complete’ can only refer to predicates where the event is conceptualized as having an undetachable process and an outcome:

(64) *The bomb finished exploding

Achievement sentences may be expressed by the following verb constellation patterns: (i)basic achievements are formed from verbs with the intrinsic features (Telic] [Instantaneous}; derived inchoatives may have durative telic or atelic constellations (ii) achievement predicates have verbs that are transitive or intransitive; perception verbs like see, hear, understand occur in achievement constellations: I saw the star, And then, I understood

SemelfactivesSemelfactives are atelic instantaneous eventualities. The term comes from the Latin ‘semel’ (once) used in Slavic linguistics to refer to a suffix which indicates a single event. (Smith 1991:55). Semelfactives are hard to distinguish from Achievements, since they are both single-stage eventualities. . They differ in the property [ telic]. Semelfactives are atelic, instantaneous processes. Prototypical examples are [cough], [knock], [hit], [flap a wing], [hiccup] [slam/bang the door] [kick the ball]. Semelfactives do not have preliminary stages, nor resultant stages. They can be considered as the simplest type of eventuality. The temporal schema of semelfactives is given below:

(65) I

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F

The single stage is represented in the schema with simultaneous initial and final endpoints. Being single-stage eventualities, semelfactives, just like achievements, are not compatible with period adverbials or the impefective viewpoint since both these expressions presuppose an interval. Hence, when semelfactive predicates co-occur with period adverbials and the progressive, they are interpreted as derived ‘durative’ processes/activities consisting of a series of repetead, iterated semelfactive events; the incompatibility is thus resolved by reinterpreting the predicate as a multiple-event activity.

(66) John was kicking the ball when I saw himJohn kicked the ball for 5 minutes

The sentences above can only be interpreted as denoting a series of kicks, an iterated (durative) Activity/Process. This interpretation is pragmatically driven by the incompatibility of the adverbial and the verb constellation. Completive adverbials of the ‘in-X-time’ type only have a temporal location interpretation:

(67) John kicked the ball in 5 minutesHe coughed in five minutes

The sentence above can be interpreted as : five minutes after something-or -other occurred, the event [kick the ball] occurred. If we look carefully, this interpretation also characterizes durative activities and achievements:

(68) He walked in five minutesThe bomb exploded in five minutes

In all the sentences above the adverbials have an ingressive interpretation, that is they indicate an interval at the end of which the event occurs.Manner adverbial likes slowly, quickly in the context of semelfactives do not refer to the progression of the semelfactive event as such but rather to the state preliminary to the event, as in the examples below:

(69) John slowly knocked on the doorJohn quickly coughed

The interpretation of these sentences is something like: John was slow to knock at the door and John was quick to cough.Since semelfactives are characterized by the feature [+dynamic] they may co-ccur with agentive adverbials like deliberately, carefully, intentionally, imperatives and as complements to ‘stop’, ‘force’ and ‘persuade’.

4.0 Viewpoint/Grammatical Aspect

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4.1.The temporal properties of situation types become semantically visible in sentences the moment viewpoint aspect contributes information.

The aspectual viewpoint of a sentence functions as an independent lens on the situation talked about. (Smith 1991:171). Viewpoint aspect makes visible all or part of a situation, without obscuring the conceptual/semantic properties of the situation type.

In English, viewpoint is indicated by the presence or absence of grammatical markers. The perfective viewpoint is phonetically zero, contrasting with the auxiliary + bound morpheme expression ‘-ing’ (the present participle form of the main verb) which conveys, in English, the progressive aspect. The progressive aspect in English corresponds to the imperfective viewpoint. Compare:

(70) (i) Mary talked (Perfective viewpoint)(ii) Mary was talking (when I entered) (Imperfective viewpoint)

As already mentioned, syntactically, information about viewpoint and situation type coexist in the sentence, since viewpoint aspect is conveyed by grammatical morphemes while situation type by a constellation of lexical morphemes.

Viewpoint is coloured by situation type but does not obscure it, i.e. the situation type is visible to the receiver irrespective of its viewpoint. Consider the examples below:

(71) (i) Mary wrote the letter(ii) Mary was writing the letter

The receiver of the sentence in (71i ) knows that the situation [Mary write the letter] is an accomplishment telic predicate and consequently has a natural endpoint. The final and initial points are visible with the perfective viewpoint.

The receiver of (ii) also knows that the predicate qualifies as an accomplishment but he also knows that the final point is not presented in the sentence, because of the information given by the imperfective viewpoint. The imperfective makes visible only some internal stages of Mary’s writing the letter (we do not know when Mary began writing the letter or whether she finished writing it; what we know is that at least the moment I entered the room she was in the process of writing the letter). The part focussed by a viewpoint is visible to semantic interpretation and pragmatic interpretation.

4.2. The main semantic difference between aspectual viewpoints (perfective, imperfective.) is how much of the situation they make visible: Perfective viewpoints include both endpoints of a situation while the imperfective viewpoint focusses on stages that are neither initial or final, excluding endpoints. In the two-component theory put forth by Smith (1991) aspectual information is represented by a composite of the situation type schema and the viewpoint temporal schema; the composite schema for 70 (i, ii) above is given below:

(73) (a) I……………..F ///////////////////////

(b) I……………….F /////////

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The slashes indicate the part of the situation schema that is focused by the viewpoint. The perfective includes endpoints, the imperfective excludes both. From the point of view of the information structure of the sentence, perfective viewpoints are closed , while imperfectives are open, i.e. imperfectives are open to additional information and inference while perfectives are not.

The perfective viewpoint presents in its entirety the temporal schema associated with each situation type, that is to say the perfective viewpoint in English interacts with situation type and its span depends on the endpoint properties of situation types. Compare:

(74) (i) activity: Pluto chased a car (*and is still chasing it) (ii) semelfactive: The young boy kicked the ball (*and is still kicking it)

(iii) accomplishment: Susan wrote the report (*and is still writing it) (iv) achievement: The plane landed (*and is still landing) (v) state: Sam owned several apple orchards (and he still owns them)

Sam owned several apple orchards ( but he no longer owns them)

In the examples in (74i-iv) the situations are presented as closed. There are nevertheless slight differences that distinguish among the endpoint properties .

The first two sentences (74i,ii) present terminated events, since the situations described qualify as atelic, while the next two sentences (74iii,iv) present intrinsically completed situations since the sentences describe telic situation types. The ‘stop’ and ‘finish’ tests distinguish between the two types of endpoints as we have already seen. Atelic predicates felicitously occur with ‘stop’ (stop chasing the car; stop kicking the ball) while durative telic events felicitously occur with ‘finish’ (finish writing the report). In contrast, stative sentences (74 v) with a perfective viewpoint – the only viewpoint neutrally available to such sentences- are flexible in interpretation. Since stative situation types do not conceptualize endpoints in their temporal pattern, statives in English are compatible with both a closed and an open interpretation, depending on context. In the open reading the state continues into the present as such, sentences naturally conjoin with present tense affirmative sentences as the example above indicates. Statives also allow for a closed interpretation, i.e. the state has ended; this reading can be asserted by conjoining stative sentences with negative present tense sentences.

With stative situation types the closed interpretation is not semantically required by the perfective viewpoint and must be due to pragmatic context (i.e. inference). The information conveyed by a state perfective is precisely that of the temporal schema for states. The schema does not include endpoints, since endpoints involve change of state. States simply consist of an undifferentiated period.

The closed interpretation of perfective non-stative predicates accounts for the successive/sequential interpretation of events in the context of when-clauses:

(75) John ran/went to bed/fell asleep when Mary got home

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In sum, the perfective viewpoint with non-stative situation types focuses on and makes visible for semantic interpretation the whole situation9.

.Imperfective viewpointAs already mentioned the imperfective viewpoint makes visible only part of the situation, with no information about its endpoints. Thus, it could be argued that informationally, sentences in the imperfective form are open, i.e. imperfective viewpoints do not linguistically present closed situations, although they allow inferences about beginnings and endings. The distinction is brought about by linguistic context. We illustrate with examples borrowed from Smith (1991:113):

(76) (i) John was singing when Mary knocked on the door(ii)* Herbert was hiding the loot after the phone rang

In both sentences the main clauses are in the progressive. With the when-clause the open reading is available. With the after-clause, which semantically requires a closed situation, the sentence is ungrammatical.

In the unmarked case, the imperfective spans an interval that is internal to the situation.

It is reasonable to assume, hence, that the imperfective viewpoint will be felicitous with situation types that are temporally characterized as having internal stages, namely Processes and Accomplishments. Since Semelfactives and Achievements do not have internal stages (they are instantaneous events) the prediction is that the imperfective viewpoint is not felicitous with these situation types.

As already mentioned, some achievement predicates may occur in the progressive, in a single event interpretation, but in that case the imperfective focuses on the preliminary stages of the event. (The plane was landing when the storm started). Recall that the temporal schema for the achievement situation type may include preliminary stages.

The imperfective viewpoint may also focus on the resultative stages of a situation. The viewpoint focuses the interval that results after the change of state. (Your socks were lying under the bed). Such sentences are stative syntactically and semantically, although they are indistinguishable morphologically from the progressive (Smith 1971:115).

9 Since the ‘perfective’ is not grammatically marked, Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) argue that the notion ‘perfective’ should be viewed as a lexical feature that characterizes bare non-stative verbs in English. The lexicon feature ‘perfective’ would, thus, account for the habitual/generic reading of the simple present with such eventive predicates. Evidence for this assumption comes from the Acc+Inf and Acc+Participle constructions in English. Compare the examples below:

(i) John saw Mary eat an apple(ii) John saw Mary eating an apple.

In (i) above it must be the case that the apple is eventually eaten; i.e. the event is bounded, closed, which is the semantic content of perfectivity. The participle embedded under the perceptual verb ‘see’ (in ii) is incompatible with the perfective (closed) reading; this suggests that actually the progressive marker is the

morpheme –ing. This conclusion is in line with Jespersen’s account of ‘the expanded tense’, namely that the progressive in English actually derives from ”the phrase he was on hunting , which meant ‘he was in the course of hunting, engaged in hunting, busy with hunting’; he was, as it were, in the middle of something, some protracted action, denoted by the substantive hunting. Here on became phonetically a …. and a was eventually dropped….”

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To summarize, the role of Viewpoint Aspect is to focus (pick out) an interval in the temporal contour of the situation described by a sentence –i.e. a temporal perspective that focuses all (perfective) or part of the situation (imperfective).

5.The Progressive Aspect in English

5.0 As could be inferred from the above mentioned, English has an obligatory choice of viewpoints: the perfective and the imperfective. Choice between them is obligatory in all tenses.

The perfective viewpoint is the dominant viewpoint since it is available for the entire range of situation types. According to the temporal properties associated with each situation type, the aspectual value of the perfective in English varies with situation type, as we have already seen: non-statives have a closed interpretation, while states may also have an open interpretation.

The progressive (BE+ Ving) is the main imperfective viewpoint. It is available neutrally for non-stative situation types. In English, the progressive is also associated with a special construction, the Futurate.

Basically, the progressive presents eventualities from an internal perspective, focusing on the internal stages of durative, non-stative predications. Progressives are typically ‘durative’ (we will dwell on this property in due time) and have connotations of temporariness, dynamism and volition (Comrie (1976), Dahl (1985), Smith (1991). The progressive has a marked use with stative predications.

(78) (i) Mary was sleeping/running/walking (when I arrived)(ii) Susan was writing a report/eating an apple/drawing a triangle (when I

arrived)(iv) *Susan was knowing the answer (when I arrived)(v) I am hating zoology class

English has been under study for a long time, and its viewpoint system has been under scrutiny for decades: traditional grammarians such as Jespersen (1931), Kruisinga (1925), Poutsma (1928), Curme (1935); structuralists like Joos (1964) or Twaddell (1965) have come up with essential insights and useful comments.

Logicians and philosophers of language like Ryle (1947), Vendler (1967), Dowty (1977), Vlach (1980), Bennet and Partee (1972/1978) Montague (1968) to mention just a few, focus on the semantics of both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect.

The aim of the present subchapter is to focus on the semantic contribution of the progressive, offering a theory able to capture the truth conditions of the Progressive. We will also attempt to offer a formal syntactic account of the Progressive in English. The next step will be to discuss the contribution of the progressive to the interpretation of the five identified situation types, as well as the conventions of use. 5.1. In the literature on ‘Aspect’ there have been a wide range of theories striving to pinpoint the core ‘meaning’ of the progressive in English in such a way as to be able to account for all the ‘shades’ of meaning highlighted by grammarians. Binnick (1991) offers a comprehensive overview of the more or less traditional approaches to the basic meaning of the progressive in English.

Starting in the late ‘60’s there has been a number of studies on the semantics (i.e. meaning) of the English progressive aspect that explicitly relate it to the

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classification of verbal predicates and sentences into eventuality/situation types. These studies have contributed to our understanding of the progressive aspect and its interaction with predicates of different situation types. Actually, an adequate description of viewpoint/grammatical aspect must account for such systematic interactions.

The main problem, addressed by all these approaches, refer to the way in which the meaning of the progressive (viewed as a kind of logical operator) is related to the meaning of the corresponding simple sentence. The matter is complicated by the fact that a progressive sentence does not seem to have a uniform characterization, since its semantic properties vary according to the eventuality/situation type of the simple sentence, as we have tried to suggest in the preceding subchapters. As we have seen, a Process sentence in the progressive (79i) entails the situation asserted by the corresponding simple sentence (79ii):

(79) (i) Max is dancing/swimming/sleeping/playing the violin entails(ii) Max danced/swum/played the violin.

By contrast this inference relation does not hold for progressive sentences based on Accomplishment predicates and their non-progressive counterparts. We cannot infer (80ii) from (80i) provided (80i) has a single interpretation (i.e. refers to one particular manifestation of the situation denoted by the predicate):

(80) (i) Susan is crossing the street/building a house/playing a Mozart sonata does not entail(ii) Susan crossed the street/built the house/played the Mozart sonata

The intuition behind (80i), as already mentioned, is that the process of crossing/ building/playing is under way, it is not over. The sentences in (80ii) can be felicitously uttered in a situation in which Susan is sort of halfway across the street, halfway in building the house, etc. The sentences, though, do not say whether she reaches the other way of the street, finishes the house or the sonata or not. That is to say, the utterance of the sentence in (80i) does not commit the speaker to any particular outcome; the actual reaching of the other side of the street is only a possible outcome of the event denoted by (80i). The interpretation of accomplishments in the progressive form is what Dowty (1979) labels the ‘imperfective paradox’ and Bach (1981) ‘the partitive puzzle’

Dowty (1979) observes that a definition of the progressive should capture the intuition behind the progressive aspect as a ‘time frame’, which intuition can be found in Jespersen (1933:263): “the chief use of the expanded tenses [progressive aspect] is to serve as a frame round something else, which may or may not be expressly indicated. This is easily understood if we start from the old phrase he was on hunting , which meant ‘he was in the course of hunting, engaged in hunting, busy with hunting’; he was, as it were, in the middle of something, some protracted action, denoted by the substantive hunting. Here on became phonetically a …. and a was eventually dropped, exactly as in other phrases: burst out on laughing, a-laughing, laughing/ fall on thinking, a-thinking, thinking; set the clock on going, a-going, going, etc. If we say he was (on) hunting, we mean that the hunting (which may be completed now) had begun, but was not completed at the time mentioned or implied in the sentence; this element of relative

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incompletion is very important if we want to understand the expanded tenses, even if it is not equally manifest in all cases. The action or state denoted by the expanded tense is thought of as a temporal frame encompassing something else which as often as not is to be understood from the whole situation….’

Jespersen’s definition includes another important intuition, namely that the ‘protracted action’ denoted by the progressive sentence had begun before the time stated or implied in the sentence. This intuition has materialized in the definition first stated by Bennet &Partee (1972/1978) according to which :

‘the progressive sentence is true at an interval I just in case there is an interval of time I’ that properly includes I. ’.

The third element in Jespersen’s definition that has given linguists a hard time is the ‘element of relative incompletion.’ Partly, this is what Dowty (1979) labels the ‘imperfective paradox’ and Bach (1981) ‘the partitive puzzle’

In order to account for the imperfective paradox that characterizes accomplishment predicates in the progressive, as well as examples like the ones in (81) below, where we can not assume that the situation denoted by the progressive extends beyond the time mentioned in the sentence, Dowty (1972), in his approach to the semantics of the progressive aspect, adopts the notion of ‘possible futures/course of events’ (Thomason (1970), Tedeschi (1981) which requires that time be branching rather than linear, that is to say that at any given moment there is not one, but an infinite number of ‘possible futures/outcomes’. The interpretation that a certain situation goes beyond the time given in the sentence is pragmatic in nature having largely to do with our general knowledge of the world associated with the inherent temporal properties of the eventualities:

(81) (i) John was watching TV when he fell asleep(ii) John was watching TV when Mary entered the room(iii) John was building a cabin when I first heard of him

The example in (81ii) allows the interpretation that John’s watching TV extended at least a few moments beyond the time when Mary entered the room. On the other hand, John may just as well have decided to stop watching TV when Mary entered. As for the example in (81i) there is no possible interpretation according to which John ‘s watching TV extended beyond the time of his falling asleep. In this case it is the temporal properties of [fall asleep] that restricts the interval to that moment. As for the sentence in (81iii) the sentence invites an interpretation that a possible outcome of John’s activity is the existence of the respective cabin, but other possible outcomes are allowed by this sentence: he may have run out of wood, he may have stopped halfway because of the rainy season etc. These possible outcomes are in no way related with the meaning/sense of the progressive, but only with the encyclopedic knowledge of the world associated with the conceptual properties of eventualities.

5.1.The meaning of the progressive aspect5.1.1. As already mentioned the progressive presents the internal stages of a situation without offering information about its endpoints. As Comrie observes the progressive

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makes ‘ explicit reference to the internal temporal structure of a situation from within’. The temporal schema proposed by Smith (1991) is in (82) below:

(82) I …… //////////…… F [+ stage]

The above given temporal schema of the progressive can be stated in the form of truth conditions. Below is, in an informal way, Dowty ‘s (1979) definition of the progressive, including accomplishment predicates, which runs as follows:

(83) The PROG is true at an interval I iff there is an interval I’ including I [and I is not a final subinterval for I’ (i.e.extending into some ‘possible futures’ of I)] at which is true.

I’

I

stands for the simple non-progressive form of the sentence, while PROG is viewed as an operator on the non-progressive sentence denoting a basic non-stative situation type. This definition will properly account for the sentences in (80,81) above. The interval I stands for the notion’ time frame’ introduced by Jespersen in his definition of the progressive. Roughly, the first part of the above given definition states that at interval I (a bounded interval) the progressive sentence is true on condition that the nonfinite component of the sentence [John watch TV/ Ken build the house] is true at I’. This means that in order for a situation to be unfolding at interval I the situation must have started before I (i.e. at I’).

The second part of the statement, within square brackets, roughly corresponds to Jespersen’s notion of ‘relative incompletion’ and accounts for the inferences of accomplishment predicates (mostly): i.e. the event denoted by the progressive may ‘culminate’ (one of the ‘possible futures’) or the events may ‘stop’. Nevertheless, as already mentioned this has nothing to do with the meaning of the progressive, but only with our general knowledge of the world associated with the eventuality type.

To better understand the meaning of the progressive we will also mention the definition given by Parsons (1990) namely that a progressive sentence requires for its truth that the situation ‘hold’ for a time. According to Parsons the progressive only asserts about the existence of incomplete events, and, hence, about the existence of incomplete objects (like cabins that are partly built).

5.1.2. Another important property of the progressive (noted by Jespersen) is that the ‘action or state’ denoted by the expanded tense (i.e. the progressive) is thought of as a temporal frame encompassing something else which as often as not is to be

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understood from the whole situation’. Jespersen’s ‘something else’ is usually signalled by other events or temporal adverbials:

(83) Susan was making coffee [when John arrived home] [at five o’clock]

It is an acknowledged fact that sentences in the progressive often seem informationally incomplete in isolation, although they are not ungrammatical.

According to Smith (1991) the sense of incompleteness that arises with imperfectives is due to the partial information that they give. In fact, native speakers sometimes reject them when they are presented out of context.

The ‘something else’ mentioned by Jespersen in his definition of the progressive has the function (together with the tense morpheme on the verb or auxiliary) to anchor the situation described in the main clause, allowing the receiver a more complete temporal understanding. The two expressions in square brackets in (83) serve as temporal anchors (anchoring events) for the main clause predicate event and they are necessarily compatible with the tense form on the auxiliary.

Along the same lines, Binnick (1991: 287) argues that from a semantic point of view we can also say that the adverbial phrase is the fram e, as it establishes a framed time for the asserted moment (i.e. interval) of Susan’s being engaged in making coffee.

Kearns (1991) differentiates between the time denoted by the adverbial, which she calls ‘framed time’, and the time of the main clause which is called the ‘framing interval’.

From a pragmatic point of view the main clause ‘Susan was making coffee’ establishes the interval against which the event of ‘John arrive home’ is set. As such the main clause establishes the background against which the foreground information is asserted.

5.2.Towards a formal account of progressive sentences5.2.1 It has long been argued that ‘tense’ and ‘aspect’ are related both formally and notionally, belonging to one and the same system; besides, the conceptual properties of a situation are visible if the situation is placed/anchored in time. Moreover, tenses may have a specific viewpoint value.

The general assumption is that ‘tense’ and ‘aspect’ cannot be treated separately because they both deal with the temporal structure of situations, their functions being complementary.

Tense places the situation in Time relative to other events/times (i.e. it expresses order relations) looking at the situation from the ‘outside’, while Aspect looks at the situation from the ‘inside’, presenting the internal structure of the situation. The three important notions here are: Situation, Tense and Aspect.

The Situation is represented by a constellation of lexical morphemes, i.e. the VP, which includes the verb and its arguments (subject and objects), while Tense and Aspect are represented by grammatical morphemes, i.e. Tense is associated with the tense markers, and Aspect (in English) with the progressive marker (be) -ing . The semantic interpretation of a sentence will therefore require that we should take into account the information provided by the two grammatical/functional categories Aspect and Tense.

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5.2.2. Ever since Reichenbach’s Tense System Theory (1947), it has been assumed that the temporal /aspectual interpretation of sentences can be properly accounted for by assuming three entities as basic: Utterance Time, (or Speech Time=S), Assertion Time (or Reference Time=R) and Situation Time (or Event Time=E)10.

In Reichenbach’s theory the temporal interpretation of the sentence was seen as an ordering of S,R, and E, which are currently assumed to represent time intervals. The ordering relations can be those of simultaneity (at relations) and sequence (after/before relations). 11 Later approaches (Comrie, 1985, Horstein, 1990) claimed that there are actually two distinct relations: Tense relates S and R and Aspect relates R and E.12

Adopting current approaches ((Zagona, 1990, Klein (1995), Stowell, 1996, Demirdache and Uribe-Extebarria, 2000, 2002, 2004) we define Utterance Time (UT-T) as the time at which the event of uttering the sentence takes place (i.e now).

It may function as an ‘anchoring’ event for another event or time interval defined , for the time being, as Assertion Time (AS-T). The Assertion Time is explicitly given by the finite component of an utterance, i.e. by the tense morpheme on the verb or auxiliary, and represents, in its turn, the ‘anchoring’ time for the interval when the situation denoted by the predicate occurs. (called Situation Time or Event Time). Locating adverbials like yesterday, on Sunday etc. may also specify Assertion Time. The relations of simultaneity / sequence between Ut-T and As-T instantiate the tense of the sentence (to be illustrated below).

The role of the functional category Aspect, is to spell out the relations of simultaneity or sequence between AS-T and the other temporal entity present in a sentence: namely, Situation Time (Sit-T) or Event Time (Ev-T). Situation Time (Sit-T) or Event Time (Ev-T) is the time interval at which the situation ‘occurs’ or ‘holds’. It is related to whatever is expressed by the nonfinite component of the utterance (the ‘lexical (semantic) content’ of the utterance).13

To conclude, Tense is defined as a relation between Ut-T and As-T, while Aspect relates As-T to Ev-T. If Tense locates a situation in time, the role of grammatical Aspect is to focus an interval in the temporal contour of the event. The time focused by Aspect is the As-T – that is, “the time for which the speaker makes a statement”, an assertion (Klein, 1995). Only the time interval focused by Aspect is visible to semantic interpretation

Since Tense and Aspect relate two times/time intervals, there is an obvious parallelism between them. The semantic parallelism between Aspect (perfective, progressive perfect...) and Tense (present, past, future ) is that both establish topological relations between two time intervals: relations of precedence (BEFORE) , subsequence (AFTER) and inclusion (WITHIN). It is therefore mandatory that we treat Tense and Aspect together since all root clauses instantiate both categories and one cannot function without the other.

10 S,R,E are Reichenbach’s terms. The terms we adopt are Utterance Time (Ut-T), Assertion Time (=As-T) and Situation Time (=Sit-T)11 Hornstein (1982) points out that intuitively S, R, E are time points (or intervals) on the time line, and the tenses are considered as ways of temporally representing events vis-à-vis the moment of speech.12 Zagona (1990) and Stowell(1993) propose to capture the idea that Tense relates two times syntactically by viewing Tense as a predicate that establishes a temporal ordering relation between its two time-denoting arguments. In particular, Tense is viewed as a head projecting a maximal projection TP that takes Ut-T and Sit-T as its external and internal arguments, respectively. The simplified phrase structure looks like:13Within a finite utterance the predicate is morphologically complex in the sense that it consists of a constellation of lexical morphemes (that is assigned to a situation type) and which constitutes the non-finite component of the utterance and an inflectional/grammatical morpheme that actually accounts for the finite nature of the entire predication and hence of the sentence. ‘Lexical contents’ do not occupy a place on the time axis, but they can be linked to time (i.e. located in time) in a finite utterance by tense and aspect, which correspond to the finite part of the utterance.

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The semantic parallel thus established between Tense and Aspect is captured syntactically by proposing a uniform phrase structure for temporal relations

From a syntactic point of view, the breaking down of Tense into its semantic components (Ut-T and As-T) captures the idea that Tense relates these two times. Tense is a head (T0) that projects a maximal projection (TP) taking two time-denoting arguments: its external argument is typically Ut-T while its internal argument is As-T. Tense orders these temporal arguments in terms of central coincidence with the meaning of (WITH)IN (present tense), or in terms of non-central coincidence with the meaning of AFTER (past tense) and BEFORE (future tense).

Likewise, Aspect is treated as a head (Asp0) that projects a maximal projection (AspP) taking two time-denoting arguments: its external argument is the AS-T and its internal argument is the time denoted by the VP (EV-T ). Aspect orders these temporal arguments in terms of central coincidence with the meaning of (WITH)IN (progressive aspect) or in terms of non-central coincidence with the meaning of AFTER (perfect aspect) and BEFORE (prospective aspect).

The phrase structure representation of the temporal and aspectual relations is illustrated below”

(83) TP Ut-T T’ T0 AspP within/after/before As-T Asp’ Asp0 VP within/after/before Ev-T VP

Let’s consider the following examples:

(85) Sheila left town yesterday

(i) Ut-T = now(ii) As-T= past (explicitly given by the tense morpheme and the matching adverb)(iii) Sit-T = viewed as occurring within the interval given by As-T

(iv) Temporal Interpretation: Ut-T after AsT (past) Sit-T within As- T

The simple past tense sentrence in (85) above contains morphologically marked tense but it does not contain morphologically marked aspect. To derive the grammar of temporal relations in systems without morphological aspect, we hypothesize, following Demirdache and Uribe-Extebarria (2002, 2004), that the external temporal argument of Asp0, (As-T), coincides with its internal argument (Ev-T) (technically, the external temporal argument (As-T) binds and is thus co-indexed with its internal argument (Ev-T)) as illustrated in (85’)

(85) Sheila will leave town tomorrow

(i) Ut-T=now

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(ii) As-T=future (will + future time adverb)(iii) Sit-T= viewed as occurring within the interval given by As-T (iv) Ut-T before AsT

Sit-T = As-T

From an aspectual point of view, in both sentences, the situation is viewed as closed, as completed , as including both its initial and final endpoints. Recall that this is the unmarked viewpoint in English.

As we can notice, with simple tense forms in root clauses the Situation time is non-distinct from the Assertion Time regarding their relative order to Utterance Time, in the sense that Sit-T is included in As-T . One other way of putting it would be to say that in root clauses the value of As-T is Ut-T . What this means is that we may take Ut-T to function as the temporal anchor for Sit-T.

Thus the standard assumption is that Past orders Sit-T BEFORE Ut-T, while the Future orders the Sit-T AFTER Ut-T. Another possible solution is the one suggested by Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2002), namely that As-T and Sit-T are coindexed. This coindexation can be represented as Ass-T/Sit-T.

As far as the Present is concerned the assumption is that the Present orders the Ut-T WITHIN the Sit-T. (or Ass-T/Sit-T) This is a natural assumption since in the unmarked case non-stative sentences acquire a state interpretation (habitual/generic) while basic states are conceptualized as boundless.

As far as the progressive form is concerned, we have argued that it encodes the imperfective aspect. Following Smith (1991) we assume that only the time interval within the time of the situation focused by Aspect is visible to semantic interpretation, i.e. only what is visible is asserted. We have seen that ‘Aspect’ can be defined as the relation between Ass-T and Sit-T , in particular, this relation can be one of ordering (e.g. As-T can be ordered AFTER or BEFORE Sit-T) or inclusion (As-T is ordered WITHIN Sit-T).

Adopting current approaches (Klein, 1992, Demirdache& Uribe-Etxebarria (2000), we shall assume that the time interval which, on a given occasion, the progressive aspect puts into focus is Ass-T, which must be a subpart/ a subinterval of the Sit-T, i.e. must be properly contained within the Sit-T.14 The way we interpret this suggestion, adopting current approaches, (Smith, 1991, Klein (1995), Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2000), Julien, 2001) is that Ass-T directs the focus toward the processual part of Sit-T. This focus is contrastive, implying that there might be other times, preceding and/or following Ass-T, in which the situation does not ‘hold’. Since the Ass-T does not include the endpoints of the situation, no assertion is made about whether an eventuality culminated, giving the open interpretation at the level of the information structure of the sentence. The semantic function of Ass-T is therefore to set ‘boundaries’ within which the situation is made ‘visible’. Consider the following examples:

(86) (i) Sheila is walking

(a) Ut-T within As-T (present)

14 With Klein, (1992) the finite component of a verb combines two components: the temporal component and a claim (‘assertion’ in the analysis of Demirdache& Uribe-Etxebarria (2000). The function of the time component is to constrain the claim (assertion) being made by some utterance to some time (As-T) that includes Ut-T, precedes Ut-T or follows Ut-T .47

(b) As-T within Sit-T

(ii) Sheila was building a house (when I met her)

(a) Ut-T after As-T(b) As-T within Sit-T

In both sentences, the interval made visible for semantic interpretation is the time asserted i.e. referred to by the Ass-T. The Ass-T refers to a subpart/subinterval of the Sit-T that does not include the initial and final endpoints of the situation , hence no assertion is made whether the situation of building the house culminated –even though the sentence is in the past. This formal account nicely accomodates the meaning of the progressive as stated in the form of the temporal schema (Smith 1991) and truth condition in (83) above. Moreover, it accounts for the intuition noted by Jespersen that ‘the action or state denoted by the expanded tense is thought of as a temporal frame encompassing something else’.

5.2.2. Recent approaches such as that of Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) suggest that the progressive –ing is an operator which involves an ‘intensionally closed event’ where ‘closed event’ denotes a process with its ‘boundaries’ and it is therefore that the progressive requires that the eventuality it operates on have a processual part. (i.e. have stages/ internal parts). This treatment of the progressive presupposes that the progressive must be incompatible with predicates that are not processual (i.e. do not have internal stages/parts), that is with stative predicates and instantaneous situation types Achievements and semelfactives). As we have seen, situations conceptualized as stative are seen as devoid of dynamics, i.e. as not involving ‘change’ or ‘stages’, which means that its boundaries are ‘ignored’, so that the situation is conceptualized as holding indefinitely.

However, the progressive morpheme –ing in itself is not incompatible with stative predicates, as the example below indicates (example borrowed from Julien, 2001:145):

(86) (i) Knowing that she was on the right track, Sue crossed the narrow river. (ii) Being more than 2 meters tall, John can easily touch the ceiling(iii) *Sue was knowing that she was on the right track

According to Julien (2001), the ungrammaticality of the example in (86iii) above is assumed to stem from the combination of the auxiliary ‘be’ with a state predicate in the progressive, obtaining what Julien (2001) calls a ‘complex (tense) construction’.

It is also to be noted that the ‘intensional closure’ reading only appears in the ‘complex (tense) construction’, hence, it must be a consequence of the progressive being combined with the auxiliary. The tense marking on the auxiliary specifies the temporal relation between the time of speech (=Ut.T), which is always ‘now’, and Assertion Time which in this case is ‘past’. In the absolute clauses in (86i,ii) above, the individual level predicates retain their aspectual properties (i.e. state). The entire expression though, does not involve Assertion Time which may give rise to a bounded (limited) reading of the verb in the progressive.

Given the temporal structure of state predications, the use of the complex progressive construction with a state predicate is not felicitous unless ‘boundaries ‘ can

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be ascribed to the state predicate. This can be achieved either by construing the predicate as a stage-level property (temporary/bounded/limited state) or by assigning internal dynamics:

(87) a) John is being crazyb) She is missing her boyfriendc) I am really loving/liking this partyd) The manager is weighing more and more

In (87a) the interpretation is that John deliberately acts crazy, in other words the event must presuppose a processual part. Parsons (1990) suggests that copular ‘be’ sentences in the progressive actually mean that ‘be’ means ‘act’ so that the interpretation may be that of an activity. The (b) sentence is interpreted as describing a temporary state. In the next sentence (87c) the performance is assumed to be still ongoing, the limit being set by the expression ‘this party’ while in (87d) the state involves ‘change’ so that in its aspectual properties it is more like an activity. What all these sentences have in common is the presence of Assertion Time (specified on the auxiliary) which directs the focus on the processual part of the event, obtaining the closure effect. The temporal-aspectual representation of the sentence in (87a) is as follows:

(88) Ut-T=nowUt-T within As-T (present)As-T within Sit-T (imperfective)

Predicates denoting single stage situations/eventualities such as ‘lucky achievements’ and ‘semelfactives’ (e.g. recognize, find, forget, notice, blink, flash, nod, kick, hit, slam, knock, etc) are not conceptualized as having internal processual parts (stages), being trivially indivisible (with the exception of predicates that presuppose a ‘prelude’). Such predicates are odd in the progressive in a single occurrence interpretation, unless we think of some unusual context such as a slow motion picture in which the beginning and end do not fall into one single moment but are separated by an interval of time. When these predicates occur in the progressive they generally acquire a process interpretation of the multiple-event type. (ATENTIE: EXEMPLE)

5. Situation Types and the Progressive Aspect

5.1 As already mentioned, discussion of the Progressive Aspect in English is incomplete unless we take into consideration the analysis of situation types, since viewpoint aspect and situation aspect contribute to the aspectual interpretation of sentences. In what follows we shall give a complete presentation of the effect that the progressive aspect has on the situation types.

A. Process Predications

Processes have been described as being made up internally of stages that are characterized as indefinite changes, i.e. homogeneous, (they are characterized as being subdivisible and additive), and having an arbitrary endpoint (i.e. they are atelic):

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(89) I ……………Farb

Process stages are homogeneous, i.e subdivisible, such that ‘any part of the process is of the same nature/kind’. Moreover, process predications are non-stative, dynamic predications, hence the progressive viewpoint, with processes, is chosen whenever one particulat instantiation (occurrence/manifestation) of the eventuality is in progress at a given reference time.

Having defined the progressive as temporally framing another event (or time interval) (i.e. Ass-T within Sit-T), we implicitly take the progressive as making reference to a specific time. The internal time picked out by the progressive is always anchored contextually, i.e. the time of the progressive is always definite (Kearns 1991:183).

Consider the following examples, where the As-T is underlined. In all the cases ‘Ass-T within Sit-T’ and the time interval denoted by Ass-T matches the tense form on the auxiliary: (the examples are borrowed from I. Stefanescu, 1988):

(90) It was raining heavily when she arrived home/ She is looking at the sea now, don’t disturb her./We are travelling now for amusement and instruction./Right now, our children are skating at the edge of the wood/I looked at the nest I had been carrying./This time last year I was traveling through Europe.

In all the examples above the process is in progress, the progressive referring to

a situation which functions as a ’frame’ (or background) for another situation or time interval, in the sense that the progressive situation extends beyond the boundaries of the latter: i.e. ‘As-T within Sit-T’

A word of caution is in order here: temporal clauses are useful because they present situations in temporal relations to other situations, and such relations depend on whether the situations are presented as open or closed. (Smith, 1991:102). When- clauses are flexible, allowing several interpretations. When (unlike after-clauses) imposes no particular relation on situations. It may occur with main clauses presenting both open and closed situations:

(91) (a) He was making some tea when they arrived(b) He made some tea when they arrived

In (91a) the situation presented is viewed as overlapping . The only reading of (a) is that ‘his making tea’ was already in progress at the time of the event of their arriving, i.e. the ‘tea-making’ began before they arrived. In this example Ass-T is within Sit-T.

In (91b) the two situations are taken as successive, the event of the when- clause being taken as preceding the event in the main clause, i.e. he began to make tea after they arrived. The situation described in main clause is viewed as closed/perfective and is taken as an inceptive for pragmatic reasons: making tea is a durative event that is likely to take much longer than the event of arriving. The temporal-aspectual representation of the sentence in (91 a,b) are as follows:

(92)) (a) He was making some tea when they arrived

(b) Ut-T after As-T (past)

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As-T within Sit-T (imperfective)

(c) He made some tea when they arrived(d) Ut-T after Ass-T (past)

Ass-T before Sit-T

The sentence in (92a) describes a process. The Progressive Aspect has the meaning ‘within’ and orders the Ass-T within Sit-T. It thus picks out a time contained ‘within’ the interval defined by Sit-T.

The meaning of Past Tense (in conjunction with the adverbial phrase) is ‘after’, that is, it orders the Ut-T after the Ass-T. Hence, (92a) focuses a subinterval WITHIN the interval defined by the event [make coffee]. This subinterval is itself located in the past since Ut-T is ordered AFTER this subinterval i.e. Ut-T AFTER Ass-T.

Progressive sentences do not have the framing effect if the time interval denoted by the durational adverbial is not felt to be shorter than the full progressive situation (Declerck). This is the case in the following examples:

(92) a)All through dinner they were talking of nothing else but the match Charleston 1955:274)b) I was knitting for two hours this morning (Charleston 1955:275)c) They were watching a football match on Saturday afternoon d) The children were having their music lesson and the baby was crying next doore)The band was playing, the flags were fluttering and the crowd was cheering as the players ran onto the field.f) Mary was sleeping when I was working (Declerck)g)They were watching television while we were workingh)While the old lady was laughing heartily….Sarah was perturbedly picking up the broken pieces of a tea cup.

The sentences above express no more than that the main clause in the progressive is simultaneous with the event in the subordinate/coordinate clause (or with the time interval stated by the durational adverb) at some time or another. What all these sentences assert is that there was/is some time interval in the past/present during which both situations were/are holding for a definite/limited time. As Leech (1971:18) puts it’ …we know nothing about the relation between their starting points or finishing points… (in such sentences) a temporary occupation is related to a period’. Actually it is assumed that durational adverbs bring in a notion of boundedness (De Swart (1998).

It should be noticed that the underlined expressions do not actually establish Assertion Time. Assertion Time is normally recoverable from the linguistic or non- linguistic context since the progressive necessarily implies the existence of a reference to a point in time In the sentences above it is the tense form itself which gives us the minimal information that whatever the time span occupied on the time line by the situation (Sit-T), it lies before the time of utterance (Ut-T). In these cases therefore,

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Ass-T is given by the tense form on the auxiliary, which is Past, and hence it is anterior to Ut-T.

As for the examples in (92 e-g), the conclusion we can draw is that whenever process situations are viewed as unfolding simultaneously over a (limited) period of time the progressive is used. The most widely used conjunctions are ’ while’,’ as’ and ‘and’.

It is interesting to mention here that durational adverbs like for x-time, all morning, etc. are not very common with the past/present progressive, being a survival from an earlier stage of the language. Nevertheless, as Mittwoch (1988) points out we can find the progressive with vague or hyperbolic durationals as in (93)

(93) You were talking on the phone for hoursThey were working on that project for ages

Leech (1971) describes the examples in (93) as actually presenting a persistent activity, there being an element of colloquial hyperbole or exaggeration, their tone being, more often than not, one of amusement or irritation.(Quirk 1972).

The sentences above are similar to those in (94) below where the durative persistent activity is underlined by adverbs like continually, constantly, forever, always. If these sentences were to occur in the simple present tense form they would have a habitual interpretation and qualify as state predications. (i.e.the sentences would ascribe a permanent property to an individual level individual). The difference between these sentences and those in the simple present tense form is accountable in pragmatic terms.

(94) My father was forever getting into trouble with the lawHe is always complaining about moneyShe is always breaking thingsMy car is always breaking downThey are always inquiring for news

We argued in previous chapters that non-stative predicates (process predicates included) in the simple present acquire a habitual interpretation, i.e. the sentences describe a characteristic property of the individual denoted by the subject NP.. In such cases we say that the entire predicate has acquired an individual level interpretation. If the progressive sentence describes one single occurrence of a process predication we say that we ascribe a property that characterizes a stage-level individual i.e. a temporary, temporally bound stage of an individual. Consider the examples below

(95) He is a night watchman and sleeps mornings/ He is sleeping nowThey always talk at meals/ They are talking pretty freelyThe engine smokes/ The engine is smoking

Habitual statements actually express a generalization over a number of particular episodes expressed by the progressive counterpart. As already mentioned they denote a disposition or potential to manifest a certain behavior that counts as evidence for the generalizations they express (Filip, 199:120)

If an interval adverbial (e.g. these days, this week) occurs with the simple present tense the sentences are more appropriately interpreted with a futurate reading also

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conveying the idea of ‘a planned’ action (they have a kind of ‘from now on’ reading) and they are not interpreted as straightforward habituals (Kearns 1991)

(96) Mary works at Bellcore this week

An interesting problem we want to address at this point is the problem of the present progressive habituals exemplified in (97) below (notice that non-durative dynamic predicates may occur in the progressive form under this reading). They look similar to the examples in (94) above with the exception of the presence of indefinite adverbs:

(97) I am taking dancing lessons this winterMary is working at Bellcore this yearIn those days we were getting up at 7 o’clockThe trains are arriving late practically every day/*sometimes this winter

All these cases have a stage level interpretation as they are true of spatio-temporally bound stages of the individuals in subject position. As can be noticed from the examples above, the time range of present progressive habituals is fixed by an interval adverbial. Leech (1971) also mentions the fact that the iterative element of meaning may be made clear by a frequency adverbial (but not by adverbs of indefinite frequency such as ‘sometimes, always’).

The sentences express limited duration and hence temporariness just like any progressive sentence. Kearns (1991) suggests that the temporary duration of the present/past progressive habituals arises by contrast with the simple present/past tense habituals, since they are used for intervals which are briefer than and contained within the interval set by the simple present/past habituals.

SemelfactivesSemelfactives have been defined as atelic and non-durative. This means they are single-stage atelic eventualities. Because of their temporal characteristics semelfactives are incompatible with the progressive viewpoint in the single instance interpretation of the respective situation/eventuality. Sentences with a semelfactive verb constellation in the progressive are always interpreted as multiple-event activities Activities of this type represent a derived situation type:

98) Someone is knocking at the door/His teeth are chattering/On the boardwalk’s flagpole the American flag is pulsing in an intermittent wind from the sea/I was coughing all night long/ The child was jumping up and down when he entered the room/The light was flashing/ John was blinking

In all the examples above the sense is that of an iterated, i.e. repeated process over the interval interpretation attached to the progressive aspect, that is to say that iteratives refer ‘to a series of individual situations of the same type repeated on a single time interval of the same occasion. In the progressive aspect we have a process re-categorized as durative by iteration’.

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If we compare the sentences in (98) to the ones in (97) above representing present progressive habituals , we notice that in the latter case we also have a series of situations but these occur on multiple occasions over an interval set by the temporal adverbial.

Event PredicationsEvent predications are characterized as telic eventualities; they involve a product, upshot or outcome i.e. they involve a definite change of state . With Accomplishment predications the change of state is prepared by some activity/process, the change being the completion of the process: e.g. build a bridge, walk to school, repair a car, drink a glass of wine, Accomplishments being conceptualized as ‘durative’ events. The interval considered includes the process and the change of state it brings about. Therefore accomplishments are complex events i.e they have other events as their components. An accomplishment is a causal structure of type [e1 causes e2) where e1 is the causing activity while e2 is the resulting change of state.

Achievements, on the other hand, focus on the change of state, back-grounding or simply leaving out the causing activity/process and the causing factor.: e.g. My father died. My father died (from his wounds) (in the end). Achievements are truly changes of state, they are ‘becomings’, they are all ‘culmination’ and are conceptualized as ‘instantaneous’ events. These two distinct types behave differently under the progressive aspect.

The ‘imperfective paradox’ characterizes all durative event predications, i.e. in the progressive forms, accomplishments re-categorize as processes unfolding at a given reference time, the reaching of the ‘goal being suspended’; whether the goal is reached at a time after the Ass-T is only one of the ‘possible outcomes’.:

(99)) (i) Lush spoke carelessly, but he was driving me into a corner (ii) The river was cutting a new channel to the sea, but the men with the sandbags stopped it from doing so.(iii) Maybe, she is making a Spanish omlette.(iv) They are still eating their dinner(v) What are you doing? I’m writing a letter(vi) Within a stone’s throw of my house they are building another house

All the sentences above contain accomplishment predications which undergo a change of aspectual class due to the progressive aspect: they recategorize as process predications that are in progress at a stated reference time, that is As-T within Sit-T.

Achievement predications, just like semelfactives, denote eventualities that take place at single moments of time, they have no proper internal parts (phases), being trivially indivisible, and hence the progressive cannot be applied to them. There are nevertheless predicates classified as achievements that quite naturally occur in the progressive. We should distinguish here two subtypes, exemplified below:

(100) The plane was landing when the storm startedJohn was dying when the doctors operated on him and saved his

lifeMary was winning the race when she stumbled and fell‘Your victim is fainting’, said the chaplain sternly

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He prepared himself to watch the play which was just commencingHe was falling asleep when he heard a noise in the garden

(101) We are constantly receiving letters of appreciationNew guests were continually arriving/ *John is arrivingHe’s been discovering fleas on his dog all morning/*John is discovering a flea.John is discovering all the clues.

The first set of examples (i.e. 100) describe one single/particular occurrence of the event denoted by the predicate and the progressive focuses on the preliminary stages of the actual change of state that characterizes achievement predicates, rather than on the internal stages. The preliminary stages represent attempts, gradual preparations etc. (Kearns 1991). Moreover, this process must be a kind of an immediate ‘prelude’ to a certain ‘outcome’. There is no suggestion at all that the ‘achievement’ actually takes place. Freed (1979) and Kearns (1991) characterize achievements in the progressive as ‘derived processes’.

Susan Rothstein (2004:543) suggests that achievements in the progressive make some use of the accomplishment structure, displaying the ‘imperfective paradox’. This is visible in all the examples in (100) above. All the examples induce the imperfective paradox. An interesting example offered by Rothstein is with the verb ‘arrive’ which is widely assumed to be unable to occur in the progressive in the single occurrence interpretation:

(102) Mary was arriving at the station when she heard that there was some crisis at the office so she turned round and went back to work. She never got to the station.

However, as Rothstein herself argues (2004:543), progressive achievements are not

simply achievements extended into accomplishment readings. Achievement progressives behave differently from the progressives of the lexical accomplishments. Here are some of her arguments: (i) whenever progressive achievements have a futurate reading and an adverbial expression like in x time modifies it, the adverbial gives information about when the telic point of the completed action will occur, relative to the Assertion Time (see 103i); (ii) when in x time modifies a futurate progressive accomplishment, it may be interpreted as giving information about when the accomplishment itself will be going on (i.e. it has an ingressive meaning) or how long the whole accomplishment will last, but not about when the telic point of the accomplishment is located relative to the Assertion Time (see 103ii). This can be seen in the examples below (Rothstein’s (4)):

(103) (i) The train is arriving in Tel Aviv in three minutesJohn is reaching the top the Eiffel Tower in ten minutes

(ii) We are eating dinner in half an hourI am writing a book in six months.

The set of examples in (101) above exemplify the second subtype of achievement predicates. All the predicates underlying these sentences are known as

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‘lucky achievement’ predicates; they do not require any preparatory activity and always resist use in the progressive .

When such predicates occur in the progressive, the progressive in these sentences only picks out a proper subset of a series of iterated events. Achievement verbs- in- series, as these predicates are known, actually qualify as processes (of the multiple-event type) due to the presence of cumulative subjects or objects; hence the progressive takes in its scope a process predication rather than an achievement.

Worth mentioning here is the case of momentary predicates like forget, realize, discover (Dowty 1979:180) with agentive animate subjects, which may occur in the progressive under the right circumstances, as in the examples below, borrowed from Dowty (1979:180):

(103’) (i) John is forgetting everything he has learnedJohn is gradually realizing that you are right

The above predicates should be treated as individual level predicates, according to Dowty, . According to Dowty (1979:180) we can assume that we have a coercion of a momentary predicate into an interval predicate.

The last group of achievement predicates we would like to mention are the so called ‘degree-achievements’ (Dowty, 1979) represented by verbs like melt, widen, cool, age, sink, rise, fall, etc. Semantically and syntactically these predicates express changes of state just like other achievements (cool means ‘come to be cool’; sink means ‘come to be not afloat, etc) but they also allow durational adverbs (Dowty 1979:88):

(104) The soup cooled for/in ten minutesThe ship sank for/in an hour (before going under completely)John aged forty years during that experience

These sentences refer to situations of gradual change; they do not require that a particular degree be reached. What this means is that these predicates do not conceptualise a final state. In a way they are similar to consumption and creation predicates (eat, drink, build, etc). These predicates usually take a resultative construction that would actually specify the final state.

These predicates belong to a larger group of degree words called ‘vague predicates’ by philosophers of language. The group also includes adjectives (specifically those that form the comparative). These predicates are characterized by the fact that they can only be defined in relation to some agreed upon standard of comparison or some particular context of use. Degree predicates can indicate a certain increase or decrease of a property.

Abusch (1987 apud Smith, 1991) presents a semantic analysis of ‘degree’ predicates in which a change takes place at each stage, but there is no natural endpoint. Each stage is closer to an absolute value (high or low) for the predicate. According to Smith (1991) such predicates qualify as processes . We may just as well consider such predicates as accomplishments assuming that the nominal phrase undergoes definite changes and the event is not strictly homogeneous because the stages differ. Such predicates are highly compatible with the progressive in which case they qualify as processes in progress at a given reference point.

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(105) They are widening the roadThe tobacco leaves are drying in the sun

State predicationsAs mentioned several times so far, the progressive applies only to non-stative

eventuality types, so this means that stative predicates which are characterized as being [+state] are incompatible with the progressive.

As we have seen states are described as having an abstract quality and a-temporal interpretation. At the level of ontology the subject noun-phrases of state predicates are described as individual-level (objects/kinds). A sentence like the one in (102) below describes a property of John independent of whether at a given moment of time (and place) John does not prove to be intelligent or kind:

(102) John is intelligent/kind/a hero

It has been argued that state predications, in general, do not have the property of ‘agency’. Of the three types of basic stative predications that we identified in (…) above, individual level states are non-agentive: one doesn’t, under normal circumstances, choose to be tall, being tall is not something one ‘does’ hence these predicates do not stand the non-stativity tests.

Stage level states and interval statives with [-animate] subjects do not pass the tests for agentivity either: ‘do’ test, agent oriented adverbs, complements to persuade/stop, etc. There are nevertheless some cases of stage-level states (denoting mostly temporary properties) that may acquire a ‘volitional’ reading and interval states with human subjects are interpreted as agentive: I persuaded Bill to be polite/ What Bill did was sit in the armchair. We can assume then that such predicates will be compatible with the progressive. Filip calls this class of predicates ‘dynamic states’.

There is nevertheless another side of the problem. There are cases of individual level states that do occur in the progressive, (they are actually quite common in English) constituting what Smith (1991) calls ‘a marked aspectual choice’, since they have a certain colour and emphasis that conventional statives lack, as many scholars have noticed. Kruisinga (1911) describes these progressive statives as ‘descriptive’, Poutsma characterizes them as ‘vivid’ while Marchand (1955) mentions their ‘immediate quality’.

In what follows we shall discuss the type of re-categorization undergone by different sub-classes of state predicates when they are used in the progressive aspectual form.

A. Stage-level states(i). Personal Property-designating adjectives and nouns

As we have hinted at several times so far, a distinction should be made between inherent properties and temporary properties. The inherent properties are always predicated of individual level subjects (be tall, be intelligent, be blond, be erudite, be widespread, be green, etc). These predicates are never compatible with the progressive. Kearns (1991) argues that ‘be’ is characterized here as a ‘copula be’. ‘Copula be’ only occurs with individual level predicates.

Temporary states, or dynamic statives, as they have been called, are expressed by predicate adjectives and nouns that may have a stative and an active reading and

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may apply to a stage (concrete manifestation) of the individual denoted by the subject noun phrase. In the simple tense form these predicates denote more or less characteristic properties predicated of an object level individual (i.e. in a way, they re-categorize as object-level predicates).15, All the predicates available for this must be under the control of an agent:

(103) a) Thomas is a hero (characteristic property of individual Thomas)16

b) Thomas is being a hero (stage-level property, valid only over the interval stated by the sentence)a) Mary is a naughty childb) Mary is being naughtya )Harry is an awkward boyb) Harry is being awkward

All the sentences in (a) describe a more or less permanent property ascribed to an individual, a property that one believes an individual to have because of one’s total experience with the individual, even though the individual is not evidencing the property at the moment. In all the (b) sentences the interpretation is that the subject deliberately/ intentionally(?) acts in the way denoted by the predicate adjective or noun, in other words the event must be viewed as containing some processual stage/phase. (Julien, 2002).

Parsons (1990) suggests that copular ‘be’ sentences in the progressive actually suggest that ‘be’ means ‘act’ so that the interpretation may be that of an activity. ‘Activity’ in this sense need not be taken literally: John’s being polite may consist in his sitting perfectly still. Kearns (1991) also assumes that ‘be’ with basic stage level predicates is an agentive ‘be’ (see also Partee 1977 who defines ‘be as an ‘active be’), and it is this fact that allows the use of the progressive with these predicates. Dowty17 (1979) assumes that what distinguishes sentences like the pairs above is the presence of an abstract ‘do’; this verb which appears with all non-statives, accounts for the agentive reading. Moreover, according to Smith (1991), these sentences also suggest that the behaviour is temporary, a property that typically characterizes the progressive. Thus the eventualities described can only endure as long as the subject is activily engaged in doing whatever behaviour is involved. Following Smith (1991:251) we

15 It is to be stressed here that not all basically stage level predicates expressed by predicate adjectives allow the progressive.: ‘be hungry/tired’ definitely attributes a temporary property to the noun phrase subject but are not compatible with the progressive form. (Leech, 1971)16Smith (1991:251) argues that sentences with these personal property predicates may be ambiguous in the perfective viewpoint between an active and a stative reading. This is proof that we DO have to distinguish between basic individual level predicates and basic stage level predicates. We examplify this statement by quoting the examples given by Smith (1991:251). As can be easily noticed the example in (1a) might refer to heroic behavior on his part (active reading) or to his character (stative reading). The adverbial in (1b) disambiguates between the two readings:

(1) (a)Bill was a hero(b)Bill was a hero that day: he rescued a drowning child from the river

17 Dowty (1979:118) suggests that the progressive sentences entail that ‘some property under his (i.e. the subject’s) control qualifies him (i.e. the subject) as …something or other that he could avoid doing as soon as he really chose to. It is this which distinguishes these examples from ungrammatical cases like *John is being six feet tall and stative sentences like John is a fool.58

assume that the two different constellations belong to two distinct situation types, i.e the progressive sentence denotes an activity/process.

Below are some more examples of property-denoting predications in the progressive borrowed from different sources (e.g. Stefanescu, 1988, Jespersen !969, Leech, 1971):

(104) -Somebody is being recklessly extravagant in the matter of advertisments-He is being sorry/afraid/happy-I don’t think she is being clever in accepting that proposal of his-There was jolly nearly being a revolution afterwards-You are not being fair to Mildred. That is why she is being so clumsy in her manipulation of pins and things.-John is being a hero in accepting that proposal-My car is being difficult these days.-You are being odd tonight.-You fancy you are being clever.

(ii). Verb Constellations of Position an LocationLocative and Position verb phrases are a sub-class of state predications that have been characterized as ‘interval statives’ since their truth condition requires an interval larger than a moment. These predicates including head verbs like: lie, perch, rest, remain, stand, sit, rest, sprawl, live etc. have been described as stage level predicates . They may occur with agentive and non-agentive subjects, hence depending on the context they may occur in Activity, Accomplishment/Achievement and Stative sentences, as the examples below show:

(105) a) Mary sat down (suddenly) on the chair (Accomplishment/ Achievement(?))

a’ Mary was sitting down when I came inb) We carefully hung the picture on the wall (Accomplishment)b’ We were hanging the picture when the earthquake startedc) Mary stood in the doorway (Activity)c’ Mary was standing in the doorway when the phone rangd) The statue stood in the corner (State)

As accomplishments and activities/processes they focus on the position or location by an agent, hence the maintaining of the position requires will or dynamism. Whenever these verb constellations occur in the progressive they simply focus on a process in progress at a given reference time.

The matter is more complicated in the case of non-agentive subjects. As already mentioned these predicates may ocuur in progressive sentences under certain conditions, that is to say these predicates just like personal property predicates may have a dynamic and a stative reading being characterized by scholars as pertaining to the class of ‘dynamic’ statives18.18 Actually it could be assumed (Dowty 1979:176) that the ‘primary’ use of these predicates is the one with animate subjects since these verbs denote positions of the human (and animal) body, the progressive being triggered by ‘intentionality’. The use of these verbs with inanimate subjects is in some way a metaphorical derivative of its primary use, the progressive being an ‘accidental’ carryover from the basic use. Actually what this means is that basically these ‘interval statives’ are basic stage-level predicates.59

A word of caution is in order here: the term ‘agentive’ is a misnomer,as progressive sentences with non-agentive subjects will never be characterized by dynamism or control, since the simplest non-stative test (the ‘DO’ test ) fails with these sentences, nor do they show any apparent movement or change of state (definite or indefinite) as the sentences below indicate (examples borrowed from Smith, 1991, Dowty 1979):

(106) The magazine lies /is lying on the table (*and the pitcher does so/is doing so too)The rug covers/is covering the floorThe socks lie/are lying under the bed One corner of the piano rests/is resting on the bottom step

The sentences above should be compared to the ones in (107) below:

(107) New Orleans lies/*is lying at the mouth of the Mississippi RiverThat argument rests/*is resting on an invalid assumptionJohn’s house sits/*is sitting at the top of the hill

Dowty (1979: 175)) argues that the conclusion to be drawn from all these examples is that this kind of progressive is subject to certain semantic restrictions, namely the progressive is acceptable just to the degree that the non-animate subject denotes a moveable object, or to be more specific, ‘an object that has recently moved, might be expected to move in the near future, or might possibly have moved in a slightly different position’.

All these observations can be subsumed under the general conclusion that the progressive of locative and position verb phrases describe a temporary state that would be ascribed to a stage level- individual i.e. to a temporally and spatially bounded manifestation of an individual.

The perfective forms of these predicates with normally stationary objects like cities represent a conversion of a stage level predicate ( which is found in John/the book is lying on the couch) into an individual level predicate, describing permanent states (i.e. ascribing a permanent property to an object level individual, as in the case of personal property predicates ( and ‘habituals ‘ in general), i.e. as a ‘generalization ‘ over a ‘suitable number’ of concrete ‘manifestations’ of the event denoted by the predicate. A ‘suitable number’ depends on pragmatic knowledge. This explanation would account for the use of the progressive in the present tense (though not in the past or future) with these predicates when they describe a state of the world at the current interval.

Dowty (1979:175) also mentions that the acceptability of the progressives of these verbs may also depend on context. Compare :

(108) a)???Two trees were standing in the fieldb) After the fire only two forests were still standing

In a narrative context, progressives of these verbs can also be employed to describe stationary objects that momentarily come into the observer’s view. The assumption is that the position of the moving observer is taking as a “fixed’ orientation point of the narrative, the locations of the objects being ‘temporary’ in relation to the moving point of orientation (Dowty, 1979:175) .

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(109) When you enter the gate to the park there will be a statue standing on your right, and a small point will be lying directly in front of you.

Motion verbs like flow, run and enter can also be used as locatives (i.e. not entailing literal motion) that would also be excluded from the use in the progressive when they describe a relatively permanent state/property :

(110) a)The river flows through the center of the town (fact of geography)b) (?) The river was flowing through the center of the village (a flood in progress)

Smith (1991:225) convincingly argues that the viewpoint of progressives with inanimate subjects is imperfective resultative. In these sentences the viewpoint focuses an interval that follows the change of state. Lexically the predicates denote the events which bring about the resultant state. Sentences with this viewpoint are semantically stative. Given the possibility of an internal or external focus in English, a sentence like ‘John was sitting in the chair’ (see also example in (105 a, c’) above) is , according to Smith ambiguous between a dynamic or stative reading: (i) it may describe John in the process of assuming a seated position, or (ii) he is already seated.

B. Individual-level states19 are represented by predicates that are members of the following subclasses:

- property designating: e,g, be tall, be widespread, be extinct, be green, be a mammal

- emotive predicates, e.g. like, love, hate, despise, loathe, desire, want, long, miss

-verbs of inert perception, e,g, see, feel, hear, smell, taste, sound, look, etc-verbs of possession e.g. have, own, possess, belong to-verbs of inert cognition, e.g. believe, hope, imagine, know, suppose, understand,trust etc .-other verbs:, cost, equal, weigh, contain, depend on, deserve, matter, resemble, include, comprise, seem, appear, etc.

All the predicates above apply to object/kind level individuals. and the property described need not manifest itself at the reference time of the sentence, as the sentences below indicate:

(111) (I) He is a head taller than me.(ii) Irma is intelligent(iii) I despise bad intentions(iv) I can see the tiniest spots/The perfume smells sweet(v) The box contains books(vi) I believe she is innocent

As already mentioned, it has long been acknowledged that sentences with stative constellations of the individual-level type in the progressive aspect represent a marked aspectual choice. The Progressive with such verb constellations have an

19 Jespersen called this subclass of state predicates ‘psychological states’61

emotional colour that is lacking in neutral presentations of states (Smith, 1991), Leech, 1976, etc).

Given the temporal structure of state predications, the use of the complex progressive construction with a state predicate is not felicitous unless ‘boundaries ‘ can be ascribed to the state predicate. As we have seen above, this can be achieved in two ways: (i) by construing the predicate as a stage-level property (temporary /bounded / limited state) or (ii) byassigning internal dynamics.. Consider the examples below (Smith 1991:20; Leech 1976:24):

(112) (i) The river is smelling particularly bad today(ii) I’m liking this play a great deal(iii) The cake has been looking done for the last five minutes(iv) Peter is believing in ghosts these days(v) I’m supposing, for the purposes of this argument, that your

intentions are unknown.(vi) I am seeing things a bit more clearly now. (vii) She was thinking that she wanted to go home.(viii) Surely, you are imagining things.(ix) The manager is weighing more and more.(x) He is resembling his father more and more as the years go by.(xi) The income of one’s parents is mattering less in education these

days(xii) Good food is costing more since devaluation.(xiii) These examples are gradually seeming less and less unacceptable

to me.

In the examples in (112 i-vii) above the predicate describes processes predicated of a temporally limited stage of an individual that are true at a given, temporally limited reference interval. The intervals are, more often than not, explicitly stated (e.g. today, these days, this play, etc.).

As far as the examples in in (112 viii-xii) are concerned we think that they are instances of situations that must be viewed as displaying some internal dynamics, i.e. (gradual) change along a continuum (similar in a way to the degree predicates widen, cool, mentioned above). The obligatory presence of adverbials like ‘more and more’, for example, support this assumption. According to Smith (1990:84) shifts of this type refer to events, not states, the sentences being elliptical for coming to resemble/weigh/cost/etc.

A few remarks are in order here. Some verbs of physical perception come in pairs. Feel, taste, smell can be used to indicate ‘inert perception’, as well as ‘active perception’. In the second case, they belong to the activity class and so may freely take the progressive (Leech 1976:23). It is to be noticed that from a syntactic point of view, the predicates display distinct behaviour: in the ‘inert perception’ reading they are syntactically intransitive, while in the ‘active perception’ reading they fall within the class of transitive verbs (Leech 1976:23):

(113) INERT ACTIVE

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I (can) smell the perfume I smell/am smelling the perfume.I (can) feel the ground I feel/am feeling the ground with my foot.I (can) taste salt in my porridge I taste/am tasting the porridge to see if it

contains enough salt.

As far as the verbs see and hear are concerned, they have the separate verbs look at and listen to that are available for the active reading. The progressive is possible especially when the focus is on the quality of the sense organs or the channel ( She is not hearing very well these days; I’m hearing you loud and clear) or when the sensation is understood to be hallucinatory (I must be seeing things; She is hearing voices) (R. Huddleston & G. Pullum, 2002:170).

With state predicates like want, hope, wonder the progressive is felt as being a more tentative and hence more polite way of expressing a mental attitude and is preferred in colloquial speech. The notion of ‘possible incompleteness’ and ‘temporariness’ that may characterize progressive sentences is extended in the context of sentences with these verbs to ‘lack of commitment’ (Leech, 1976:24). Leech makes the following remarks on the examples in (114) below:

(114) (i) I hope you’ll give us some advice vs. I’m hoping you’ll give us some advice.

(ii) What do you want vs. What are you wanting(iii) We wonder if you have any suggestions vs. We’re wondering if you have

any suggestionsThe simple tense form leaves the addressee ‘little room for polite refusal; the

progressive form implies that the speaker has not finally committed himself: he is ready to change his mind about his feelings should the listener’s reaction be discouraging’. (Leech 1976:24). 20 The progressive fulfills in the examples above a similar function to that of the Past Tense, as in: I wondered whether you could give me some advice or Did you want to see me now?. The two forms can be combined in a Past Progressive construction with doubly self-deprecatory connotations: I was hoping you’d look after the children for us/ I was wondering whether you’d give us some advice.

We end this sub-chapter by quoting Leech (1976) again, ‘..unavoidably, there are some exceptions to the rule which have not been dealt with here. Some instances that one may hear in colloquial English today seem difficult to fit into any system of rules and classes. It is to be accepted that this area of usage which is unstable at the present time, and is probably undergoing continuing change.

The Perfect in English

The aim of this subchapter is to introduce and discuss important matters concerning the characteristics of perfect sentences in English. Perfect constructions have a characteristic set of temporal location and aspectual values, and appear in many languages. Traditionally, the term referred to a tense of ancient Greek21. Nowadays it is 20 The Simple Present Tense form (most direct) may be used politely only when the listener is invited to do something which is to his own advantage: I hope you’ll come and have dinner with us when you’re in London next (Leech 1976:25)21 In point of terminology there is a clear difference between the ‘perfect’ and ‘perfective’. The former refers to a construction with particular temporal and aspectual characteristics, while the latter refers to a closed 63

used for constructions that have a certain temporal and aspectual meaning, whether or not they involve tense. (Smith 1991:146).

In English the perfect is signalled by the auxiliary have, which obligatorily selects the past participle form of the main verb. Perfect sentences appear with Present, Past and Future reference time and with both an indefinite and progressive viewpoints. One of the roles of have is to carry the tense morpheme (present, past). The examples below illustrate Present, Past and Future Perfects:

(62) (i) Now John has arrived(ii) Last Saturday John had (already) arrived.(iii) Next Saturday John will have already arrived.(iv) Marian has/had been reading Knowledge of Language

In all these cases the adverbials in conjunction with the tense morphemes (Present, Past, Future) specify AS-T , and the sentences describe a situation, namely [John arrive] as occurring at a time (EV-T) that is different from the specified Reference time (i.e. AS-T).

So, one of the hallmarks of the Perfect is that it picks out a time (i.e. EV-T) different from the interval defined by the AS-T. It is assumed that the perfect encodes the temporal relations between AS-T and EV-T.

Since the perfect encodes the temporal relations between AS-T and EV-T placing the former after the latter, we assume with Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2004) that the perfect can be analyzed as a marker of aspect represented as the spatio-temporal predicate AFTER. The aspectual meaning of the perfect is thus closely related to its temporal meaning. Under this analysis the Perfect Aspect acts like a Past Tense: both past and perfect are spatiotemporal predicates with the meaning of AFTER. The Phrase structure of the Perfect is given below

63) TP Ut-T T’ T0 AspPWithin/after/before As-T Asp’ Asp0 VP

after Ev-T VP

This representation perfectly accomodates the presence of perfect constructions in contexts where the inflectional past tense cannot occur:

(64) (i) Sheila may have left last week(ii) Susan’s having left early surprised everyone

grammatical viewpoint. Both come from the Latin word ‘perfectus’ the past participle of ‘perficere’ (to carry, end, finish, accomplish). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘perfect’ was first applied to the Latin tense which denoted a completed action or event viewed in relation to the present and then with qualifications to any tense expressing completed action; the first such use cited in OED is 1530. (Smith 1991:164). In English the aspectual relations identified as PERFECTIVE and PERFECT are encoded as follows: PERFECTIVE is encoded by the simple form, while the perfect encodes the PERFECT.64

Let’s analyse each of the sentences in (62) above. In (62i) the adverb in combination with the present tense morpheme -s specify the AS-T : AS-T overlaps the time of utterance (i.e. UT-T WITHIN AS-T ) and the event as such is located within the interval prior to AS-T (i.e AS-T AFTER EV-T), hence the situation is viewed as completed and within an interval that extends back from the moment of speech –the ‘extended now’ interval (McCoard 1984).

Ev-T Ut-T

(65) …[………]……[….. …]….> As-T

The reference times of the next two examples (62ii, iii) are similarly extended in some way to include the time of John’s arrival. Both sentences have unspecified Past and Future reference times (i.e. UT-T precedes or follows AS-T); they also convey that the event precedes the reference time ( i.e. AS-T AFTER EV-T ). To conclude, the situation described in a perfect sentence is viewed as completed in relation to a reference time ( our AS-T) which itself can be located in the present, past or future.

The example in (62iv) instantiates the perfect of the progressive. The phrase structure for this sentence is given in (66) below

TP(66) Ut-T T’ T0 AspP2

within/after As-T2 Asp’2 (perfect) Asp0

2 AspP1

after As-T1 Asp’1 (progressive)

Asp0

1 VP within Ev-T VP

The lowest head, Asp01 is the spatiotemporal predicate WITHIN; it orders the external

argument (AS-T1) within the EV-T, focusing thus a subinterval of the event denoted by the predicate. Moving up the tree, the next head (Asp2) is a spatiotemporal predicate with the meaning AFTER. It orders its external argument (AS-T2) AFTER its internal argument AS-T1 . Thus Asp2 picks out a time interval AFTER the interval defined by AS-T1 i.e. AS-T2 denotes a time interval AFTER a subinterval of the event time , that means after AS-T1. Hence AS-T2 can denote a time that falls before its culmination (67a), after the culmination of the event (67b) or contains its culmination.:

AS-T1 AS-T2

(67) a) ........[...............[...............]..[..............]......|.......]. EV-T (UT-T) UT-T

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AS.T1 AS-T2

b) ........[...............[...............]......]...[..............]......|... EV-T (UT-T) UT-T

Once we add tense AS-T2 will itself get located with respect to utterance time Tense orders its external argument UT-T AFTER or WITHIN its internal argument AS-T2. Note that UT-T is ordered relative to AS-T but unordered relative to the final bound of the event, hence it can fall either before the culmination of the event or after the culmination of the event. The fact that AS-T2 is unordered relative to the final bound of the event explains why no assertion is made in a perfect progressive sentence about whether or not the event described culminated before UT-T. In the present perfect progressive sentence, the schema in (67a) the event is not culminated at UT-T i.e. she is still reading at UT-T. In schema (67b) Rosa finished her reading before UT-T Hence : ‘Marian has been reading Knowledge of Language’ may be interpreted as :she is still reading it/she only finished it a week ago,.

The contribution of the perfect to the meaning of the sentence is that it makes available an AS-T distinct from the EV-T. The situation described by the VP occurs prior to AS-T (due to the auxiliary have) while the tense morpheme , shows that AS-T is concomitant/before /after the time of Utterance i.e.UT within/after/before AS-T , AS-T AFTER EV-T. In this case the time sphere is present/past/future;in all the cases the claim is made about a time span that does not include the event at stake i.e the aspect component says that AS-T is in the posttime of EV-T (i.e. AS-T AFTER EV-T) .

Perfect sentences have a stative value They present a state of affairs (a situation) that results from and is due to the prior situation, as illustrated by the present perfect examples below. It is assumed (Giorgi &Pianesi 1998:97) that this is the contribution of the perfect morphology.

(67) (i) Anabelle has gone to Paris(ii) They have built a cabin in the mountains(iii) Helen has danced with Tom (twice)(iv) The ball has rolled down the hill(v) Susan has been sick

In all these sentences the focus is on the (consequent ) state that obtains in the present, a state which is due to the occurrence of the situation described by the VP.

Present Perfect sentences in English ascribe to their subjects a property that results from their participation in the situation (Smith 1991:148). Let’s consider the examples in 64(i,iii) above. The sentences assert that their subjects have participated in the events described. We understand not only that an event of going to Paris has taken place or that an event of dancing has occurred, the sentences attribute to their respective subjects the property (experience) of having gone to London and the property (experience) of having danced, that is to say in order for the subjects to receive the participant property , to experience the events described they must be sentient beings (roughly, they must be alive at reference time). It is assumed that this pragmatic felicity

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requirement on the use of the perfect accounts for the oddity of a sentence like the following:

(65) Einstein has lived in Princeton

The sentence is grammatical but pragmatically infelicitous when uttered after the death of Einstein (Jespersen 1931:60). This failure is accounted for in terms of the participant property. The felicity requirement is that the person referred to by the subject NP must be able to bear the property ascribed to them by a perfect sentence. The notion of Current Relevance is sometimes invoked to explain the infelicity of such sentences (Jespersen 1931, McCoard 1978).

According to Giorgi and Pianesi (!998:95): ‘only perfect tenses, which separate the reference time (i.e. AS-T) from the event time (i.e EV-T) permit assertions about the involvement of the subject to be separated from those of the event itself….. With the simple tenses R (i.e. AS-T) coincides with (or contains ) the time of the event, so that the participation of the subject in the event is viewed together with the event itself’.

To conclude this short introduction, we will assume with C. Smith (1991:146) that Perfect constructions generally convey the following related meanings:

a) the situation described precedes Reference time (i.e. As-T after EV-T) (i.e. perfect tenses make available a reference time distinct from the event time) ;

(b) the construction has a resultant stative value; in Giorgi and Pianesi’s (1998) terms, ‘the perfect tenses provide individual level predicates’.

(c) a special property is ascribed to the subject, which holds at a given reference time by virtue of the participation in the situation.

There are some differences across languages (e.g. French, Romanian, German vs English) but these are the primary identifying characteristics.

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