Aspect (two VERY different things)

Grammatical Aspect – Viewpoint aspect

Lexical Aspect (Vendler) – Situation Aspect

Verb with bare stem

V+

VP _{V+ NP}

Walk to the park

Walk in the park

Intuitive differenc: WTTP has a natural endpoint… no matter what you do you have reached a natural endpoint

WITP: has no natural endpoint

Read War and Peace (has natural endpoint) Telic

Read books (does not have a natural endpoint) Atelic

You have Lexical Aspect

Grammatical Asepct is like Tense, it is determined higher in the tree

Stative, and non stative.. in lexical aspect

STATIVE

Permenant (Individual level predicates)

City was on a cliff

Walked into the room, saw a table. It was wooden

(past tense is b/c of the OBSERVATION)

Temporary (Stage level predicates)

City was at war

I saw John when he was lying there. He was drunk

NONSTATIVE (eventive)

Telic

(see up a bit)

Atelic

(see up a bit)

Grammatical Aspect… Everything in English is either

(For viewpoint aspect we need the complete sentence…)

Perfective

Bake -> Baked

I baked a cake

I will bake a cake

I read the book last week

Started AND finished

I will read the book next week

Sloppy: the event is completed… not true

“I read the book” means I finished

“Last week, I read the book”

NOT “Last week, I was reading the book”

Imperfective

Bake -> be baking

I was baking a cake

I will be baking a cake

Quick test: Perfective present doesn’t exist

DON”T THINK:

Perfective… the end.

IT ALSO means START AND END… I read the book last week…

I enjoyed the book… I enjoyed the whole thing

Imperfective

An ANOPHORIC Aspect..

I can walk into your study and say “John read war and peace”

But not “John was reading war and peace”

You need, “just yesterday”

“I will be reading war and peace” + next time you see me

“I will read war and peace” is ok

Imperfective ALWAYS need a temporal interval to lock into… you need to hook it

Onto something…

Covert NOW: something is ongoing at a certain time…

Imperfective… something is ongoing…

[I was baking] [at 5pm.]

Don’t need to specify start or end or lack of completion..

You are cleary claiming one thing… that the temporal adverbial

was sometime during the event.

Also: the verb must be BEFORE the temporal adverbial

Gerunds:

I am reading

Look at Penn Tree Bank Annotation

Talk to Mike Collins…

Ben Synder