Layers of Aspect

Layers of Aspect reexamines the syntactic and semantic analyses of aspect that have been proposed mainly on the basis of aspectual expressions in English. The contributions to this volume contrast expressions sharing an analogous morpho-syntactic makeup and some core distributional and semantic properties, drawing on a wider range of new empirical data from languages as diverse as Syrian Arabic, Urdu, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian and German. These comparisons raise a number of issues concerning the general applicability of formal semantic definitions of aspectual values and the syntactic analysis and interpretation of auxiliary constructions.

The papers in this book 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 (Schaden), and the morphology-semantics mapping.

Paricia Cabredo Hofherr is a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Brenda Laca is professor of linguistics at the Universite Paris 8.