Aspectual Issues: Studies on Time and Quantity

This book is a collection of nine papers, eight of them written after the author’s well-known A Theory of Aspectuality published in 1993. The aim of the book is (a) to explain Verkuyl’s 1993 theory and to simplify its exposition; (b) to explore its consequences for a number of areas, in particular issues concerning habituality, the role of aspectualizers marking the beginning, middle or end of events, the interaction between tense and aspectuality, the role of temporal Path structure in distributive and collective quantification, the differences and correspondences in the ways in which Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages express aspectuality, and related topics. Several papers contain a critical analysis of Davidson’s event semantics and indicate that neo-Davidsonians either use the wrong tools for a proper analysis of aspectuality or that they (need to) adopt some of the crucial assumptions of the author’s theory, in particular the asymmetry inherent to aspectual construal and his consequent plea to take numbers rather than events as the primitives structuring our concept of time.