|
On the parameter of aspect| old_uid | 4166 |
|---|
| title | On the parameter of aspect |
|---|
| start_date | 2008/02/25 |
|---|
| schedule | 10h |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| summary | This talk presents work in progress in collaboration with Svetlana Vogeleer on Aspect in French and Russian. I attempt to situate some of Vogeleer's semantic hypotheses in a syntactic framework.
I assume that deictic tense interpretation involves the mapping of a situation described in vP onto the point of time which the T node denotes. This point of time is contained in an interval of time associated with the CP domain.
If we assume that vP can describe all the Venderlian event types in all languages, and that similarly all languages can, in one way or anther, point to the three semantic times, Present, Past, and Future, the question becomes "Why do sentence structures expressing temporal interpretation vary so much from one language to another"?
For instance, the Russian imperfective past in (1a) translates into French as either
(progressive) (1b) or (anterior) (1c).
(1) a. Masha ela jabloki.
b. Masha mangeait des pommes,
c. Masha a mangé des pommes.
I will assume that the difference between languages is to be found in the grammar of Aspect which is based on a (small) set of functional morphemes affixed to V or merged with vP either in the vP domain or in a higher Aspect domain.
Vogeleer describes two different approaches to aspect, each of which is appropriate for different language types. The "point of view" or temporal approach is appropriate for Romance languages, while the "quantization" approach is appropriate for Slavic languages.
I will propose that these two approaches may be associated with distinct syntactic levels of Aspect, independent of aktionsart , which determine tense interpretation in different ways.
Each level is available in principle in any language and a language may use a mixture of the two.
For morphological Aspect, in vP itself, grammatical morphemes merged with V in the lexicon or in morphology determine the quantized or cumulative internal structure of the event. This structure is then predicated directly of the time line in T.This mapping gives the progressive reading of imperfectives, which are cumulative.
There may be an intermediate level of "point of view" Aspect. This seems to be a kind of nominalized or participial level, in which a syntactic morpheme, the participial head,
maps the entire event vP defines onto some point of time relative to (that is, before, after, or simultaneous with ) a not-yet identified higher point of time. The higher point of time may be either the evaluation time in T or the reference time interval in Comp.
Suppose either strategy is available in Russian. If a cumulative vP is mapped directly onto a past evaluation time, Russian (1a) translates as French (1b). Suppose the Russian vP may alternatively be construed as a nominalized participial form predicated onto a relative point of time. If the participial form is mapped onto a present time interval, as it is overtly in French (1c) in its experiential construal, then we can understand why Russian (1a) may also be equivalent to (1c). |
|---|
| responsibles | Copley |
|---|
| |
|