Carlota S. Smith

The parameter of aspect

Preface. Introduction. Part I: 1. The Approach. 2. Situation Aspect. 3. The Linguistic Realization of the Situation Types. 4. Viewpoint Aspect. 5. Temporal Location. 6. The Formal Analysis of Aspect. 7. Aspectual Meaning in Discourse Representation Theory. Part II: Introduction to Part II. 8. The Aspectual System of English. 9. The Aspectual System of French. 10. The Aspectual System of Russian with G. Rappaport. 11. The Aspectual System of Mandarin Chinese. 12. The Aspectual System of Navajo. References. General Index. Name Index.

Temporal Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese

This article presents an account of temporal understanding in Mandarin Chinese. Aspectual, lexical, and adverbial information and pragmatic principles all contribute to the interpretation of temporal location. Aspectual viewpoint and situation type give information in the absence of explicit temporal forms. The main, default pattern of interpretation is deictic. The pragmatic principles are the bounded event constraint, the simplicity principle of interpretation, and the temporal schema principle. Lexical and adverbial information can lead to non-default interpretations. Two other temporal patterns — narrative dynamism and anaphora — appear in text passages that realize the “discourse modes” of narrative and description.

The Syntax and Interpretation of Temporal Expressions in English

The only obligatory temporal expression in English is tense, yet Hans Reichenbach (1947) has argued convincingly that the simplest sentence is understood in terms of three temporal notions. Additional possibilities for a simple sentence are limited: English sentences have one time adverbial each. It is not immediately clear how to resolve these matters, that is, how (if at all) Reichenbach’s account can be reconciled with the facts of English. This paper attempts to show that they can be reconciled, and presents an analysis of temporal specification that is based directly on Reichenbach’s account.

A Class of Complex Modifiers in English

The linguist is concerned with meaningful generalizations about language.* In writing a generative grammar, an ordered set of rules that predicts the sentences of a given language, he looks for generalizations that can be translated into economical rules. Optimally a generative grammarl uses a relatively small number of general rules to predict many different structures. This paper will focus on a particular group of sentences-those containing2 adjectives-and construct rules to generate them. The first section will be devoted to the formulation of rules that bring adjectives into containing sentences, and the second will discuss adjectival comparisons (some of which are covered by the earlier rules) in detail. There are two steps in accounting for a grammatical fact or group of facts in the framework of generative grammar. First, a rule is formulated that will most simply produce the sentence(s) in question. Second, that rule must be related to the rest of the grammar, which means that a place in the ordered sequence of rules must be assigned to it. This step is as important as the first one: to be really economical, a grammar must exploit structural similarities between sentences whenever possible. At one stage in its development a particular sentence may have a structural similarity with another that it will lose later, so that a new rule must be carefully dovetailed with the others to apply to a maximum number of cases. These considerations will underlie the following discussion.

A Speaker-Based Approach to Aspect

The aspect of a sentence presents a situation in a certain light, contributing to the point of view conveyed by a sentence. The contrast between perfective and imperfective viewpoint is one component of sentential aspect, and another component is the type of situation talked about. It is well-known that the components interact in some way. One familiar example involves entailment: entailments differ for imperfective sentences, depending on the type of situation talked about. In spite of examples like this the relation between situation type and perspective is not very well understood. I will present an analysis which deals with the contribution of both components to sentential aspect. An essential factor of the analysis is the role of the speaker, who is responsible for the choices that indicate the point of view of a sentence.

Activities: States or Events?

The general concepts of event and state are important to human beings as they manage in the world: they are helpful in recognizing dangerous and benign motion, situations that may result in changes of interest, etc. In the sentences of natural language these concepts are conveyed by four semantic categories proposed in Vendler (1957), known as Accomplishments, Achievements, States, and Activities. It is clear how three of these categories are related to the general concepts: the first two are events, the third are states. The status of the Activity category is less clear. Activities have something in common with each concept. I will argue here that Activities form a natural class with events, however. The argument is based on the behavior of sentences associated with the Activity concept in narrative and other sequential contexts. The keys to the argument are the property of dynamism and the contribution of the perfective viewpoint.

Time With and Without Tense

How is temporal information conveyed in language? Do tenses code temporal information directly? Does the universality of temporal interpretations arise from a common syntactic structure necessarily including a Tense Phrase (TP)? From the study of tenseless languages and mixed-temporal languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Navajo, this article addresses fundamental questions about the grammaticalization of time. It is proposed that two simple pragmatic principles constrain direct temporal interpretation in languages with tense (English, French), and guide indirect temporal interpretation in languages without tense: (i) the default intepretation of present tense sentences as located in the present, (ii) the ‘Bounded Event Constraint’, i.e. the fact that bounded events cannot be located at Speech Time. A more general principle of Simplicity ensures that Present takes precedence over the Future (as futurity is never a ‘purely temporal’ concept). According to this view, a few very general grammatical principles account for temporal interpretation in both tensed and tenseless languages. The syntax of fully-tensed languages includes a TP, conveying direct information about temporal location. The other types of languages have an Aspect Phrase, but no TP. Aspectual information about boundedness and information about internal temporal properties (Static/Dynamic, Telic/Atelic, Durative/Punctual), coupled with the invariant pragmatic principles, suffice to derive temporal interpretation.

Event types in Mandarin

Does Mandarin Chinese distinguish among atelic, telic, and change-of-state events? These terms distinguish the basic types of nonstative events in a classification that is often used in current discussions; originally due to Aristotle, it was revived by Kyle (1947), Kenny (1967), and Vendler (1967). Events and states differ in this classification according to factors of internal temporal structure. These factors are perceived very generally as crucial properties of events, human beings having common perceptual and cognitive abilities. In posing the question above lam not asking whether speakers of the Mandarin language are aware of the distinction between types of events — that is, how they think. Rather, I ask whether there is a linguistic basis for the distinction in Mandarin. The question is about the grammaticization of event types. There is some reason to think that Mandarin distinguishes atelic and change-of-state events but has no grammatical realization of telic events. In this article I consider how telic events are realized in Mandarin and then pursue the discussion in the context of a general theory about aspectual systems. In that context certain difficulties turn out to be only apparent; the difficulties involve the analysis of resultative verb complements, a type of complement unique to the Mandarin language.

Aspectual Entities and Tense in Discourse

Linguistic expressions form interesting patterns in discourse. In the domain of temporality, the morphemes of tense and aspectual viewpoint pattern significantly within a discourse. Shifts of viewpoint and tense are often associated with shifts of direction, and with the distinction between foreground and background. One important reason for this effect is that aspectual viewpoint and tense form closed sub-systems in language. In a closed system, choice of one term implies contrast with the other possibilities. The element of choice and its contrastive significance allows for more than one level of discourse meaning.

Temporal Structures in Discourse

In conversation, narrative, and other discourse, temporal reference often extends over several sentences. I will be interested in this paper in how extended temporal reference is established and maintained. Most of the discussion focuses on English, but I develop a general account.