Layers of Aspect (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes)

The eight articles in this volume reexamine the syntactic and semantic analyses of aspect that have been proposed mainly on the basis of aspectual expressions in English. The authors contrast expressions sharing an analogous morpho-syntactic make-up and some core distributional and semantic properties, drawing on a wide range of new empirical data from languages as diverse as Syrian Arabic, Urdu, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, and German. The papers address four aspect-related problems in particular: the grammatical and semantic constraints on the different readings of the present perfect, the semantic and syntactic analysis of auxiliaries, the impact of adverbial expressions on the aspectual properties of the sentence, and morphology-semantics mapping.