The Parameter of Aspect

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This book presents a unified theory of aspect as a parameter of universal grammar. It provides a combination of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic approaches to a single domain, as well as detailed linguistic analysis of five languages with very different aspectual systems: French, English, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and Navajo. Extensive discussion of the linguistic evidence is complemented by a formal semantic treatment, set in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory. The analysis offers an explicit procedure for arriving at the aspectual meaning of a sentence from its syntactic surface structure. Among the theoretical innovations are a principled account of the interaction between viewpoint (perfective, imperfective) and situation type (state, event); a principled account of aspectual shifts in language; a level of pragmatic analysis at which inferred meanings are stated; a default analysis of sentences that are neither perfective nor imperfective.