Alice F. Freed

The semantics of English aspectual complementation

I. Methodology and Theoretical Assumptions.- 1.1. Theoretical Framework.- 1.2. Methods of Analysis: Presupposition and Consequence.- 1.3. Aspect.- 1.3.1. Aspectual Constructions.- 1.3.2. Aspectual Distinctions.- 1.3.3. Aspectualizers Defined.- 1.4. The Corpus.- II. Aspectualizers and Events.- 2.1. Why an Event Analysis.- 2.2. The Philosophical Treatment of Events.- 2.3. A Temporal Analysis of Events.- 2.3.1. A Description of Onset, Nucleus, and Coda.- 2.3.2. Formal Conditions for Onset, Nucleus, and Coda.- 2.4. Other Philosophical Categories.- 2.4.1. Events as Compared with Activities, Actions, and Processes.- 2.4.2. Events as Distinct from Propositions and Objects.- III. Events and Aspectual Verb-Types: Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, States, and Series.- 3.1. Events and Aspectual Verb-types.- 3.2. Distinguishing Among Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, States, and Series.- IV. A Detailed Characterization of Aspectualizers - I: Begin and Start Compared.- 4.1. Descriptive Approach: Syntactic and Semantic Properties.- 4.2. Begin and Start.- V. A Detailed Characterization of Aspectualizers - II: Continue, Keep, Resume, and Repeat Compared.- 5.1. Keep and Continue compared.- 5.2. Resume.- 5.3. Repeat.- VI. A Detailed Characterization of Aspectualizers - III: Stop, Quit, and Cease Compared.- 6.1. Stop and Quit Compared.- 6.2. Stop and Cease.- VII. A Detailed Characterization of Aspectualizers - IV: Finish, End, and Complete Compared.- 7.1. Finish and End Compared.- 7.2. Finish and Complete.- VIII. A Summary of the Syntactic and Semantic Characteristics of Aspectualizers.- 8.1. The Syntactic Form of the Complements.- 8.2. to V and V-ing Compared.- 8.3. Presuppositions, Consequences, and Co-occurrences with Different Aspectual Verb-types.- 8.4. Other Properties of Aspectualizers Summarized.- Table I: Aspectualizers with Noun Objects.- Table II: Presuppositions and Consequences of Aspectualizers.- Table III: Aspectualizers with Different Complement Verb-types.- Data Sources.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.

Women, men, and type of talk: What makes the difference?

In a study of dyadic conversations between four female and four male pairs of friends, the use of the phrase you know and questions are examined within three types of discourse. Women and men are found to use these features with equal frequency; and all speakers, regardless of sex or gender, use them in comparable ways. Although these particular discourse features have been previously associated with a female speech style, the results of this study show that it is the particular requirements associated with the three types of talk that motivate their use, and not the sex or gender of the individual speaker. The problems of generalizing about the characteristics of female or male speech, outside of a particular conversational context, are discussed; and it is shown that a gendered style cannot be adequately defined by counting individual speech variables removed from the specifics of the talk context. (Gender, questions, tag questions, discourse analysis, conversation analysis)

The form and function of questions in informal dyadic conversation

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of 1275 question tokens which occured in approximately seven hours of conversation between twelve pairs of same-sex friends; the conversations were taped in an experimental setting. The paper establishes a taxonomy of question functions which illustrates how questions vary along an information continuum and presents findings which show a notable correspondence between the pragmatic/social function of questions and their syntactic form as used in informal dyadic conversation. Central to the discussion are the specifies multiple ways that questions function for speakers in casual conversation and the correspondences between the function and the syntactic form of the questions used to accomplish these particular goals.

Language and Gender

In the past several years the subfield of sociolinguistics known as language and gender has developed a sophistication that could not have been predicted from the research of the early 1970s. While this area of study has evolved along many of the same lines as other branches of sociolinguistics, the lessons of language and gender research have informed the wider field by producing an awareness of the subtlety of such categories as sex and gender (along with class and ethnicity); it has forced a reevaluation of these categories, once assumed to correlate in a straightforward fashion with language variation.

KIRA HALL & MARY BUCHOLTZ (eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self . London & New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. x, 512. Pb.

It is unusual for a collection of articles to be as interesting and valuable (while simultaneously diverse) as are the articles assembled here. The papers in this excellent collection reflect the dramatic change that language and gender research has undergone in the past decade, and as such they provide an extremely useful source for anyone seeking a fresh view of the research in this field.

22.95.

There is a great temptation when studying an isolated segment of English grammar to consider independently the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the items under investigation. However, when the goal is to correlate syntactic and semantic properties of particular linguistic elements (here related to aspectualizers and their complement structures), these two types of information must be analyzed side by side. The theme of the next several chapters is a description of the nature and use of various aspectualizers with emphasis on the presupposition and consequence relations associated with the sentences in which the verbs appear. In addition, the interaction of these verbs with the event analysis presented in Chapter II is considered. These are essentially SEMANTIC questions. Yet, since all analysis presented herein assumes the existence of a context in which a given form can be analyzed, it is obvious that the SYNTACTIC shape of the various sentences studied will be an important part of the description. The characteristic structures in which each verb is found will thus be identified. As different forms occur in different contexts, we will be able to conclude that particular syntactic forms can be correlated with specific semantic features and further that particular verbs, because of their associated presupposition and consequence relations, occur in certain syntactic structures and not in others.

A Detailed Characterization of Aspectualizers — I: Begin and Start Compared

The semantic and syntactic consistency of aspectualizers does not stop with the verbs themselves but extends to the characteristics of the arguments that they operate on. It will be shown below that the complements which cooccur with this group of verbs can, in general, be classified as denoting EVENTS. This is intended to mean that the complements of aspectual verbs are semantically classifiable as events as opposed to propositions (or facts) and in most cases as distinct also from objects.

Aspectualizers and Events

The essence of language is human activity — activity on the part of one individual to make himself understood by another, and activity on the part of that other to understand what was in the mind of the first. These two individuals, the producer and the recipient of language, or as we may more conveniently call them, the speaker and the hearer, and their relations to one another, should never be lost sight of if we want to understand the nature of language and of that part of language which is dealt with in grammar (Jespersen, 1965, p. 17).

Methodology and Theoretical Assumptions

The aspectual verbs described in the preceding chapters have been shown to share numerous syntactic and semantic characteristics. The last four chapters have concentrated on delimiting the DIFFERENCES among these twelve verbs although it was determined in the chapters before these that the verbs in question were similar enough in character to allow and even call for an analysis based on a constant underlying theme — this the temporal analysis of events presented in Chapter II. In this final chapter, the various facts presented in the four preceding chapters will be summarized and the verbs will be grouped according to syntactic SIMILARITIES in addition to the aspectual or semantic similarities used to group them earlier. Several charts will be presented which portray a limited number of important co-occurrence possibilities present for the various verbs.

A Summary of the Syntactic and Semantic Characteristics of Aspectualizers

It has been amply demonstrated that a comprehensive description of aspectualizers requires an analysis of the complement structures with which they occur. A determination of the aspectual nature of these complement sentences and verbs constitutes an important part of such an analysis. Viewing events as consisting of various temporal parts, as well as being distinguishable into several different types, provides us with a means by which we may classify event-naming verbal expressions into different aspectual types. That is, different classes of verbs can be distinguished according to the type of event named by the members of that particular class.