Aspectual Roles And The Syntax-Semantics Interface

This book presents a theory of the interface between lexical semantics andsyntax in which aspect plays a central role. The aspectual properties thatfigure in th... » 

This book presents a theory of the interface between lexical semantics andsyntax in which aspect plays a central role. The aspectual properties thatfigure in the linking between syntax and semantics are expressed throughaspectual roles assigned by a verb to its arguments. A number of lexicalsemantic phenomena can be expressed as operations over aspectual roles andsyntactic phenomena can be classified according to whether or not they aresensitive to the presence of aspectual roles. The theory is independent of anyparticular model of syntax such as GB or LFG. This theory proposes a modularrelationship between aspectual role information and conceptual or thematicrepresentations of lexical semantic information. Languagespecificgeneralizations about linking are argued to be expressed in thematic orconceptual representations while universal linking generalizations areexpressed in aspectual representations. Consequently this theory hasimplications for language acquisition. A number of recent works have treatedaspect of lexical semantics or argument structure in their own right but nonehave focused on aspect as central in the relation between lexical semantics andsyntactic argument structure. «