THE PARAMETER OF ASPECT

Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

Volume43

Managing Editors:

GENNARO CHIERCHIA, Cornell University PAULINE JACOBSON, Brown University

FRANCIS J. PELLETIER, University 0/ Alberta

Editorial Board:

JOHAN VAN BENTHEM, University 0/ Amsterdam GREGORY N. CARLSON, University 0/ Rochester DA VID DOWTY, Ohio State University, Colurnbus GERALD GAZDAR, University 0/ Sussex, Brighton

IRENE HEIM, MIT., Cambridge EWAN KLEIN, University o/Edinburgh

BILL LADUSA W, University 0/ California at Santa Cruz TERRENCE PARSONS, University o/California, Irvine

The titles published in this series are listed at the end o/this volurne.

THE PARAMETER OF ASPECT

CARLOTA S. SMITH

Department 0/ Linguistics, The University 0/ Texas at Austin, U.S.A.

Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith. Carlota S. The parameter of aspect I Carlota S. Smith.

p. cm. -- (Studies in linguistics and philosophy Includes bibliographical references.

1. Grammar. Comparative and general--Aspect. I!. Series. P281.S57 1991 415--dc20

Printed on acid-free paper

All rights reserved

1. Title.

© 1991 by Springer Science+ Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1991

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1991

v. 43)

91-6280

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-0-7923-2496-6 ISBN 978-94-015-7911-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-7911-7

T ABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE INTRODUCTION

PART I

CHAPTER 1 - THE APPROACH

1.1. 1.1.1. 1.1.2. 1.2. 1.3. 1.3.1. 1.3.2. 1.3.3. 1.4.

The general theory The two components in sentences Aspectual systems in language Aspectual choice The structure of the aspectual components The logic of markedness Markedness and aspectual choice Situation type categories and prototype theory The parameter of aspect and Universal Grammar

CHAPTER 2 - SITUATION ASPECT

2.1. Conceptual features of the situation types

xiii xv

3

3 5 8

10 14 14 16 20 22

27

28

VI T ABLE OF CONTENTS

2.2. The causal chain 33 2.3. The Situation Types 36 2.3.1. States 37 2.3.2. Activities 44 2.3.3. Accomplishments 49 2.3.4. Semelfactives 55 2.3.5. Achievements

The Achievement situation type 00 Achievement situations 00 Achievement sentences 00

CHAPTER 3 - THE LINGUISTIC REALIZA TION OF THE

3.1.

3.2. 3.3. 3.3.1. 3.3.2. 3.3.3. 3.4. 3.4.1. 3.4.2. 3.5.

SITUATION TYPES 65

Semantic & syntactic properties associated with the situation types 65 Basic-level situation types 71 Situation type shifts 75 Marked focus: Super-Iexical morphemes 75 Other cases of marked aspectual choice 79 Perception verbs, personal property predicates 81 Derived situation types 85 Multiple-event Activities 85 Habitual statives 86 Indeterminacy and inference 87

CHAPTER 4 - VIEWPOINT ASPECT 91

4.1.1. 4.1.2. 4.2. 4.2.1. 4.2.2. 4.2.3. 4.3. 4.3.1.

Families of viewpoints Information and aspectual viewpoints The main viewpoint types Perfective viewpoints Imperfective viewpoints The Neutral viewpoint Viewpoints and Conventions of Use Pragmatic conventions and closed systems

93 94

101 103 111 119 124 124

T ABLE OF CONTENTS vii

4.3.2. Direct interpretation, Augmented interpretation, Pragmatic focus 125

4.3.3. Some general conventions 127 4.3.4. Narrative conventions and the viewpoints 130

CHAPTER 5 - TEMPORAL LOCA TION

5.1. 5.2. 5.2.1. 5.2.2.

5.3. 5.3.1. 5.3.2. 5.3.3. 5.4.1. 5.4.2.

Time and temporallocation Temporal information in sentences The coordinates of temporallocation A systematic account of temporal reference and temporal location Tenses and the Perfect Tense The Perfect Senten ces about the present Adverbials Compositional rules

135

135 137 137

140 145 145 146 151 154 160

CHAPTER 6 - THE FORMAL ANALYSIS OF ASPECT 167

6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.3.1. 6.3.2. 6.4.

6.4.1. 6.4.2.

Formalizing aspectual concepts Situation Aspect Viewpoint aspect The Perfective Viewpoints The Imperfective Viewpoints From form to meaning: Determining the aspectual meaning of sentences Intrinsic features Sketches of compositional rules

CHAPTER 7 - ASPECTUAL MEANING IN DISCOURSE

167 168 171 173 175

177 180 182

REPRESENTATION THEORY 187

7.1. Meaning and language understanding 7.1.1. Discourse Representation Theory

187 191

viii

7.2.

7.2.1. 7.2.2. 7.2.3. 7.3. 7.4.

T ABLE OF CONTENTS

Formalizing aspectual and temporal meanings in the DRS framework Aspect in Discourse Representation Structures Temporallocation information in a DRS Relating the DRS to a model Aspectual indeterminacy and inference Additional DRSs

PART 11

193 193 199 200 202 208

INTRODUCTION TO PART 11 217

CHAPTER 8 - THE ASPECTUAL SYSTEM OF ENGLISH 219

8.1. Introductory characterization 219 8.2. Viewpoint aspect 220 8.2.1. The perfective viewpoint 220 8.2.2. The imperfective viewpoint 222 8.2.3. Conventions of use 227 8.3. Situation type 228 8.3.1. Temporal properties in sentences of English 228 8.3.2. Statives 229 8.3.3. Activities 231 8.3.4. Accomplishments 233 8.3.5. Semelfactives 236 8.3.6. Achievements 237 8.4. Temporallocation and aspect 239 8.4.1. Present tense 240 8.4.2. The perfect 241 8.4.2.1. Temporallocation in the perfect 241 8.4.2.2. The aspectual value of the perfect 243 8.4.3. The Futurate 246 8.5. Verb constellations of special interest 248 8.5.1. Super-Iexical morphemes 248 8.5.2. Verbs of perception 249 8.5.3. Verb constellations of position and location 249 8.5.4. Personal properties 251

T AHLE OF CONTENTS ix

CHAPTER 9 - THE ASPECTUAL SYSTEM OF FRENCH 253

9.1. Introductory characterization 253 9.2. Viewpoint aspect 254 9.2.1. The perfective 254 9.2.2. The imperfective 258 9.2.3. The Neutral Viewpoint 263 9.3. Temporallocation 267 9.3.1. The Past Tenses 267 9.3.2. The Present tenses 272 9.3.3. The future tenses 275 9.3.4. Conventions of use 277 9.4. Situation aspect 280 9.4.1. Temporal properties in sentences of French 280 9.4.2. Statives 281 9.4.3. Activities 285 9.4.4. Accomplishments 289 9.4.5. Semelfactives 291 9.4.6. Achievements 292

CHAPTER 10 - THE ASPECTUAL SYSTEM OF RUSSIAN 297 with Gilbert Rappaport

10.1.1. Introductory characterization 297 10.1.2. Morphological preliminaries 298 10.2. Viewpoint aspect 300 10.2.1. The perfective viewpoint 301 10.2.2. The imperfective viewpoint 302 10.2.3. Conventions of use 306 10.3. Situation Aspect 315 10.3.1. Grammatical features of Russian 315 10.3.2. Temporal properties in sentences of Russian 316 10.3.3. Statives 318 10.3.4. Activities 320 10.3.5. Accomplishments 323 10.3.6. Semelfactives 324 10.3.7. Achievements 325 10.4. Temporallocation 327

x T ABLE OF CONTENTS

10.4.1. 10.4.2. 10.4.3. 10.5.

Tense 327 Adverbials 328 Infinitives 329 Negation 335

Appendix: Test for the viewpoint aspeet of a verb form 338

CHAPTER 11 - THE ASPECTUAL SYSTEM OF MANDARIN CHINESE

11.1. Introduetory eharaeterization 11.2. Viewpoint aspeet 11.2.1. The perfeetive viewpoints 11.2.1.1. Le 11.2.1.2. Guo 11.2.1.3. Resultative Verb Complements and the perfective

viewpoint 11.2.1.4. Tentative reduplieation 11.2.2. The imperfeetive viewpoints 11.2.2.1. The progressive zai 11.2.2.2. The stative imperfeetive zhe 11.2.3. The neutral viewpoint 11.2.4. Conventions of use 11. 3. Situation aspeet 11.3.1. Grammatieal features of Mandarin Chinese 11.3.2. Temporal properties in sentenees of Mandarin Chinese 11.3.3. Statives 11.3.4. Aetivities 11.3.5. Aeeomplishments 11.3.6. Semelfaetives 11.3.7. 11.4.1. 11.4.2.

Aehievements Super-Iexical verbs Position and loeation verbs

343

343 344 344 344 348

353 356 356 357 358 363 366 369 369 372 374 377 380 384 385 387 388

TABLE OF CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER 12 - THE ASPECTUAL SYSTEM OF NA V AJO 391

12.1.1. 12.1.2. 12.2. 12.2.1. 12.2.2. 12.2.3. 12.2.4. 12.2.5. 12.3. 12.3.1. 12.3.2. 12.3.3. 12.3.4. 12.3.5. 12.4. 12.4.1. 12.4.2. 12.5. 12.5.1. 12.5.2.

Introductory characterization Preliminaries: The Navajo verb Viewpoint aspect The perfective viewpoint The imperfective viewpoint The progressive viewpoint The neutral viewpoint Conventions of use Situation aspect The Navajo sentence Syntactic correlates of the Navajo situation types Durative events Instantaneous events Statives Lexical and morphological factors Super-Iexical morphemes Verb Lexeme Categories Time expressions Temporallocation: tense and adverbials Temporal duration Appendix: Examples of VLCs

REFERENCES GENERAL INDEX NAME INDEX

391 393 395 397 398 400 401 403 407 407 411 414 419 420 422 422 425 428 428 428 433

437 457 463

PREFACE

During the period I have been working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation, for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. ANational Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, allowed me time to pursue this project. I also thank the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Texas for research support.

I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Östen Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentIess comments and questions throughout. The individuals with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real difference to the working out of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including cOlloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and the University of Tel Aviv. Finally, I thank Adrienne Diehr and Marjorie Troutner, of the Center for Cognitive Science, for their efficient and good-humored help throughout.

INTRODUCTION

1. Aspectual meaning contributes to the information and point of view conveyed by a sentence. It is through aspectual meaning that we grasp what type of event, or state, is talked about; and aspect conveys a temporal perspective which focusses all or part of the situation. There is also an interesting subjective factor, because a choice of aspectual meanings is often available to the speaker. In this book I will present a theory of aspect. The theory constructs aspectual meanings, and shows how they are conveyed by linguistic forms and pragmatic conventions.

As introduction to the topic I give some key examples. The sentences of 1 may refer to the same event; they differ in temporal perspective, or aspectual viewpoint. la has the perfective viewpoint and Ib the imperfective viewpoint. Consider the aspectual information given by the two sentences.

(1) a. b.

J ohn and Mary built a rock garden last summer J ohn and Mary were building a rock garden last summer

From la we know that a building event occurred in its entirety: a rock garden was built to completion. In contrast, 1 b conveys only that a building event was in progress. There is no information about wh ether it was completed. These examples show that the perfective viewpoint spans an entire event, while the imperfective spans only part of it. Thus the span of a viewpoint makes information about the event available to the receiver of a sentence. Now consider another pair of sentences. They present situations which differ subtly in aspectual meaning.

xvi

(2) a. b.

INTRODUCTION

The bird was flying The bird was in flight

The difference is that 2a presents an activity, while 2b presents astate. The two represent situation types with different temporal properties: activities are dynamic and states lack dynamism. Under certain circumstances, either sentence of these pairs might be used to refer to a given event.

In this book I will explicate such intuitions within a theory of aspectual meaning. Aspect is the domain of the temporal organization of situations. The aspectual meaning of a sentence results from interaction between two independent aspectual components, situation type and viewpoint.

The two-component theory provides a principled approach to the relation between the situation type (event or state) and the viewpoint (perfective or imperfective) of a sentence. There is certainly such a relation, as many sc hol ars have recognized. It is well-known that adverbial co-occurrence, verb affix occurrence, and patterns of entailment, involve such notions as event or state on the one hand, and aspectual viewpoint on the other. The theory that I will present offers a general treatment of the interaction between these different notions. It leads to a consistent and elegent formal account of aspectual meaning. The theory is stated as a procedural, process-oriented treatment of semantic and pragmatic meanings in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory.

Aspectual systems provide the speaker with a choice of situation type and viewpoint. Because truth conditions often underdetermine the possibilities, a speaker may talk about situations in more then one way. For instance, a situation may often be presented either as an event or a state, as in the examples above. The choice of the speaker is essential in an account of aspectual meaning.

The linguistic forms of a given sentence present a situation of a certain type from a certain temporal viewpoint or perspective. Syntactically it is dear how both types of information can be available in a sentence. The viewpoint is generally indicated morphologically, with affixes or special forms; the situation type is indicated by a composite of verb, arguments, and adverbials. Thus the forms that specify each aspectual component co-exist in a sentence.

Languages differ in the aspectual meanings they express. The basic situation types and viewpoints appear generally , yet they vary from one language to another. Not all possible aspectual meanings are

INTRODUCTION xvii

grammaticized in overt or covert categories. Some differences are straightforward, some quite subtle. I will present a theory that is general enough to account for the similarities, and yet has sufficient precision for particular systems and variations. The development of such a theory presents achallenge that is familiar in linguistics: one of the classic problems in the field is to account at once for the similarities and differences among languages. I shall take the parametric approach, in which aspect is taken as a sub-system with its own internal organization, characteristics, and dimensions along which it varis. The theory identifies viewpoint and situation aspect as the basic components of aspectual systems.

Parametric variation occurs across languages in many domains, including the aspectual domain. Such variation is orderly and to some extent predictable. To account for it, I will pro pose formal and substantive principles that underlie the domain of aspect in Universal Grammar. The principles provide the parameters that determine its realization in the grammar of particular languages. The notion of two components is the formal organizing principle of the theory. The two appear in the grammars of allianguages.

The substantive principles for both components are based on the temporal structure of situations, that is, states and events. Situation types are categorized in terms of the temporal structure of situations, and viewpoints present a perspective on the situations. Formal temporal schemata state the essential properties of both situation types and viewpoints. Situations are classified according to their temporal properties, following an approach originally proposed by Aristotle. The aspectual viewpoints, which take a particular temporal perspective on a situation, differ as to how much of the situation they present. Although many distinctions can be made, the theory recognizes only a small number of situation types and viewpoints. This decision leads to very general categories and recognizes a wide range of realization across languages.

2. I will assume that the aspectual categories are not language dependent, but are based in human cognitive abilities. People distinguish between the basic situation types on the basis of their perceptual and cognitive faculties, just as they make certain other distinctions such as that between mass and count nouns. Human beings make aspectual distinctions automatically. States, activities, etc. impress themselves on our notice, organizing the way we see the world. As Roger Brown comments in Words

xviii INTRODUCTION

and Things, certain concepts are probably formed without language, particularly "conceptions of space, time, causality, and the enduring object" (1958: 195). Among the concepts that humans distinguish without being taught are states and different types of events.

Evidence for this claim can be adduced from language acquisition and from the systems of diverse languages, that is, from language universals. Children make aspectual distinctions easily, without being taught. It is hard to imagine how they could do this unless the distinctions were perceptually and cognitively based. Perhaps the most basic distinction is that between states and events that have dynamism: that is, between stative and nonstative situations. Children acquire very early on the linguistic forms that depend on this distinction. In English, for instance, the progressive occurs only with non-stative sentences. Roger Brown notes in his detailed study of language acquisition that the progressive is the first inflectional form produced by children, and that it appears almost without error from the beginning (Brown 1973:324-8). In other words children's early utterances with the progressive are non-stative: they do not say things like I am loving you, which is not a good sentence of English. Brown notes that at the stage where tense inflections are very often overgeneralized, the ing inflection of the progressive appears only with non-statives. Kuczaj 1979 substantiates this, citing children's creative verb formations that show abstract knowledge that goes beyond the correct use of individual forms. These observations suggest strongly that the distinction between stative and non-stative is made very early, on a cognitive basis.

Additional acquisition evidence comes from the study of such varying languages as Turkish, Italian, Japanese and Polish. Aksu 1978 studied three Turkish children who were just under 2 years of age; she reports that their acquisition of the past tenses showed awareness of the distinction between stative and non-stative. The children first acquired the di perfective and the iyor imperfective pasts, both of which appear only with non-statives. Further, Aksu's evidence suggests that the children distinguished between events according to whether or not they involve change of state. Aksu's subjects used the iyor past with atelic verbs and the di past with telic and change of state verbs: in the adult language these tenses appear with non-statives generally (1978:50-52). Situation aspect holds of sentences; but some studies discuss verbs only. In such cases I will follow the study by referring to verb type rather than sentence type.

Similar evidence has been presented for Italian: according to Antinucci

INTRODUCTION xix

& Miller 1976, the distinction between stative and non-stative is one of the earliest made by children learning Italian. Moreover, Antinucci & Miller show that children learning Italian create a past-partiple-object agreement rule that applies only to telic situations. The fact that similar acquisition patterns have been shown for such different languages constitutes impressive evidence that the distinction between stative and non-stative situation is cognitively based. See also the discussions of the acquisition of Polish and Japanese in the references below.

Another type of evidence comes from the study of languages of the world. The aspectual distinctions to be explored here appear in the grammars of many strikingly different languages, although not all distinctions are ho no red in aIllanguages. A partial list includes: Bulgarian (Lindstedt 1985), ChiBemba (Givon 1972), Chinese (Li & Thompson 1981, Smith 1987), English (Vendler 1967), Finnish (Heinamaki 1983) French (Garey 1957, Rohrer 1978, Smith 1987), Georgian (Holiskey 1981), German (Hoepelman & Rohrer 1981), Japanese (Jacobsen 1982, 1984), Kikuyu (Johnson 1981), Korean (Lee 1982), Lakhota (Foley & Van Valin 1984), Navajo (Hardy 1978, Midgette 1988), Polish (Weist et al 1984), Russian (Timberlake 1982, Brecht 1985), Serbo-Croatian (Cochrane 1977), Spanish (Talmy 1985).

3. This book has three goals: I present the two-component theory of aspect, formalize it within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory, and show in detail how the theory it applies to five different languages. Discourse Representation Theory provides for semantic representations which include the conceptual as weIl as the truth-conditionallevel of meaning. The procedural, process-oriented treatment it uses is particularly appropriate for the domain of aspect. Use of this theory allows the integration of aspect with other semantic features of sentences and texts, most importantly for this treatment the temporal location information in a sentence and text.

The languages studied - English, French, Russian, Mandarin, and Navajo - are from three language families. English, French, and Russian are all Indo-European, but their aspectual systems are quite different. Russian was included because of its salient aspectual system and the strong Slavic tradition of work on aspect. It is necessary to show that a general theory of aspect can be applied to Russian. The last two languages are less well-studied, and represent different language families. Mandarin Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language (Norm an 1988: 12-16). As is typical of

xx INTRODUCTION

this family, Mandarin has a rich aspectual system; it is simple morphologically; the pragmatic component is particularly important since the language does not have tense. Navajo is an American Indian language of the Athapaskan family, spoken in New Mexico and Arizona. There are other Athapaskan languages in Alaska and the Northwest territories of Canada, and in small enclaves in the western United States. The Navajo language has a distinctive pattern of lexicalization and an intricate and very specific morphology. These features affect its aspectual system.

The particular languages were chosen for rather personal reasons. I work at a level of detail which requires real familiarity with a language. It was clear that I would be able to present studies of only few languages, but variety was important since I was seriously interested in a general theory. I was fortunate in being able to work on Russian with my colleague Gilbert Rappaport, of the Department of Slavic at the University of Texas. I do not claim to have chosen a representative sampIe oflanguages; still, the ones analyzed here are different enough to challenge the range of the two-component theory of aspect.

In the first section of this book I present the general theory and show how it functions as a parameter of Universal Grammar. Chapter 1 intro duces the theory; Chapters 2 to 4 discuss universal and particular features of situations types and viewpoints; Chapter 5 discusses temporal location. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with formalization of the theory in semantic and conceptual terms. Part 11 applies the theory to the analysis of five languages which differ conspicuously in their aspectual systems.