Introduction: The In(ter)dependence of event structure, aspect and tense

Lingua 118 (2008) 1657–1663 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua

Introduction: The In(ter)dependence of event structure, aspect and tense Raffaella Folli a,*, Heidi Harley b,1 a

School of Communication, University of Ulster, Shore Road, Newtownabbey, Co., Antrim BT37 0QB, UK b Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0028, USA Received 25 June 2007; accepted 25 June 2007 Available online 2 October 2007

Abstract The rationale for bringing together work on tense, aspect and event structure is discussed. Papers by Gehrke, Ramchand, Zagona, Basilico, Van Hout, Gue´ron and Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria are described, and the connections and disparities between them considered. # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Perfectivity; Telicity; Modal; Slavic; Particle; Interval; Root; Tense

Over the past 15 years, generative linguists have devoted intensive study to the syntax and semantics of event structure, making considerable progress in the syntactic of fundamental notions such as state, activity, achievement, accomplishment and semelfactive, and significantly elucidating the relationship between these analyses and verbal semantics, including event decomposition and theta-role assignment. A fairly coherent picture of vP-internal syntax and semantics has emerged in the work of such investigators as Ramchand, van Hout, Borer, Basilico, and the present authors, among many others. The semantics and, to a certain degree, the syntax of tense and aspect has equally been a focus of considerable attention, but interestingly has not tended to interact much with event-structure research, which has been more concerned with the lexical semantics of verbs and their arguments than with the effects of said semantics on the higher temporal operators. Consequently the two fields have tended to remain fairly delineated; temporal and aspectual researchers have not been

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 28 903 66615. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Folli), [email protected] (H. Harley). 1 Tel.: +1 520 626 3554. 0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2007.07.003

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too concerned with the increasingly complex goings-on below the vP level, and event structure researchers tend to use aspectual semantics as a testing ground for identifying lexical eventstructure classes of verbs without worrying too much about how aspectual or temporal interpretations actually interact with the event-structural semantics derived within the vP. In 2005, we (Raffaella Folli and Heidi Harley) organized a workshop at Cambridge University, aimed at bringing together investigators from the two fields and stimulating discussion precisely on the nature of the relationship between the event-structure/aktionsart properties of the vP and the aspectual and temporal predicates that interact with them in the higher domains of the clause. The workshop covered research ranging from Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria’s treatment of the interaction of tense, modality and aspect in English all the way down the spine of the clause to Basilico’s investigation of the interaction of roots, particles and aspect in Russian. Other papers addressed particular issues raised by the aspect/aktionsart interface. Zagona introduced a particular, previously unaddressed, subcase of the interface between aktionsart and viewpoint aspect, what she terms ‘Contained Perfectives’, where the telos of the event is situated within a larger temporal window of viewpoint aspect. Van Hout investigated the complex problem of the acquisition of aspect, reporting that different types of morphological marking of similar aspectual categories may dramatically affect children’s acquisition of the distinctions. Gehrke developed a nuanced analysis of the apparently different effects of ‘source’ particles and ‘goal’ particles on aktionsart properties, showing that a unified account is indeed possible once their distinct monotonic semantics are taken into consideration. Ramchand proposed an innovative semantics for viewpoint aspect, giving it a treatment in terms of definiteness, rather than temporal intervals. Gue´ron proposed to unify the analysis of the TP and vP domains, interpreting the same lexical items in the same way in each, with differences emerging from the distinct ontologies of each domain. The workshop successfully brought together several disparate strands of investigation in an engaging confluence of discussion and debate, as we hoped it would; the idea to bring together the further-developed and connected ideas in the form of a collection of papers like this followed naturally. Below, we describe the main threads of analysis and conclusion of each paper in the special issue, and then discuss our impressions of what, if any, overarching conclusions or lessons may emerge from this collection as a guide and jumping-off point for future work. Gehrke’s paper Goals and sources are aspectually equal: Evidence from Czech and Russian prefixes discusses in particular goal and source prefixes. Her first claim is that internal, or ‘lexical’, prefixes are event-structure-building prefixes, with the specific aspectual function of identifying the result state sub-event, i.e. the telos of the event (Ramchand, 2005, this volume). External, or ‘superlexical’, prefixes on the other hand, are adverbial modifiers in Czech and perfectivity markers in Russian. Her second claim deals specifically with the difference between source and goal prefixes and in particular with Filip’s (2003) claim that in Czech, goal and source prefixes differ, since only source prefixes can co-occur with measure phrases like po- ‘a bit’. Therefore, while goal prefixes are telic, source prefixes are atelic. Gehrke’s paper in fact shows that both source and goal prefixes in Czech are internal and mark telicity, but that the unavailability of goal prefixes with measure phrases has a different source and is not a reflex of an aspectual difference. Rather it is due to a difference in the semantic properties of spatial expressions. Source prefixes’ result states are upward monotone (in the sense discussed by Zwarts and Winter, 2000) and can therefore be modified by a measure phrase, while goal prefixes’ result states are not upward monotone, hence their different behaviour. Ramchand’s paper Perfectivity as aspectual definiteness: Time and events in Russian proposes a combined and integrated analysis of the emergence of the temporal and aspectual properties of

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verbs in Russian. The first part of Ramchand’s paper extends her ‘first phase syntax’ approach to the analysis of lexical prefixes in this language (Ramchand, 2005). She argues that superlexical prefixes do not belong to the first phase syntax, but attach to an outside level, a second phase where temporal variables are introduced. In accordance with extensive literature on the topic, and in particular with Filip (2000, 2003, 2004), Ramchand provides evidence that telicity or quantization are not sufficient criteria on which to base a distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs in Russian, due in particular to the behaviour of superlexical prefixes and their ability to give rise to perfective verb forms. Her proposal, in line with that of Stowell (1996) and Demirdache and Uribe-Extebarria (2000), among others, argues for a hierarchical ordering of projections (vP < AspP < TP) interacting semantically with their complement domain in similar ways. The paper then address the question of how to understand what gives rise to the perfective interpretation if perfectivity is not dependent on telicity and its syntactic representation involving a result phrase. Ramchand’s paper proposes a novel semantic treatment of tense interpretations according to which assertion time is not an interval but an individual variable, a simple time instant which can be definite or indefinite with consequences for the derivation of perfective or imperfective forms. Basilico’s paper The syntactic representation of perfectivity also deals with Russian prefixes, with the perfective/imperfective alternations and the various syntactic differences between perfective and imperfective verb forms. The account rests fundamentally on the adoption of a Distributed Morphology approach to word formation (Halle and Marantz, 1993), and in particular on the different combinatorial possibilities of roots. Crucially, perfective prefixes are argued to combine with roots before they combine with functional heads, i.e. they give rise to ‘altered roots’ which now introduce an argument position and denote a state. The altered root is then combined with a functional v head, giving rise to a perfective verb denoting a predicate of events. With imperfective verbs, on the other hand, the combination of the root with the v head is immediate, preceding aspectual affixation. Notice that this implies that perfective verbs are not seen as derived from imperfective verbs. Rather on this account, the two forms are related only at the pre-word level by their being formed from a single root. Van Hout’s paper Acquiring perfectivity and telicity in Dutch, Italian and Polish is an acquisition study comparing the development of perfective aspect to the acquisition of imperfective aspect, in Dutch, Italian and Polish. The study reveals that the perfective aspect is acquired earlier than the imperfective, and, moreover, that the three languages under consideration differ: perfective aspect and the completion interpretation associated with it when it occurs with eventive verbs is acquired by Dutch and Polish children earlier than by Italian children. This crucial difference in the acquisition of perfective aspect is causally related by van Hout to the morphological marking that the perfective has in the three languages. More specifically, the faster acquisition of this form in Dutch and Polish is argued to be due to the existence in those languages of a different morphological form for the perfective and, crucially, the different location of affixation of the perfective aspect: the perfective is realised as a prefix in Dutch and Polish, whereas other tense/aspect markers are realised as suffixes. This is not the case, on the other hand, in Italian, where all tense inflections are realised as suffixes. Van Hout refers to this difference as a difference in ‘‘morphological salience’’ of the perfective. Where the perfective morphology is salient, acquisition is easier since a unique form-to-meaning correspondence can be more easily established by the child. In her paper, Perfective Aspect and ‘Contained Perfectivity’, Zagona proposes to account for the interaction of situation type with different temporal frames, an effect which has sometimes been called ‘coercion’ in the literature. One central instance, which Zagona calls a

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‘contained perfective’, arises when a temporal adverbial or other temporal framing element appears which is not compatible with the event type of the predicate, as in Planes landed for an hour or Fred backed down for a while. In these sentences, the endpoint(s) of the telic situations described by the predicates are contained within a larger temporal perspective, a reference time which extends beyond the end of the individual telic events of the predicates, hence ‘contained perfective’. Zagona proposes that the Asp8 head enters into two distinct relationships: an Agreement relation and an Alignment relation. Asp8, as in Demirdahe and Uribe-Extebarria’s analysis, takes a Reference Time argument in its specifier. The temporal contour of the RT interval is determined by an Agree relation with the nearest temporal element: the event itself (vP) if nothing else is present, but potentially with a temporal modifer such as for an hour or for a while. In such a case, the temporal contour of the RT may differ from the temporal contour of the event itself. Then the second function of Asp8 comes into play: The temporal contour of the event is ‘aligned with’ the temporal contour of the RT. This alignment results from the fact that ET is bound by RT. In the usual case, RT as a whole binds ET. If RT has subintervals (as determined by its temporal contour), and if ET is compatible with such an interpretation, ET may take a subinterval of RT as its antecedent, leading to the Contained Perfective reading. Different factors affect whether this subinterval binding relationship is possible. Importantly, Zagona shows that this coercion process does not actually alter the essential event type of the predicate. In the sentence John suddenly knew the truth, the interpretation involves an apparent shift from stative know to an achievement, come to know. However, this does not change the behavior of the clause with respect to standard event-type diagnostics such as clefting: *What John did was suddenly know the truth is still ill-formed. Rather, the effect arises from the alignment process between an RT interval that has been modified by an Agree relationship and ETs of various types. Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria’s paper, Scope and anaphora with time arguments: The case for Perfect Modals develops and extends their ‘adpositional’ treatment of tense and aspect to account for the interaction of perfect aspect with certain modals. In their framework, tense and aspect heads are two-place predicates such as BEFORE (future/prospective), WITHIN (present/progressive) and AFTER (past/perfect), which order two temporal arguments with respect to each other. The Reichenbachian utterance time and assertion time arguments of these predicates sit in the specifiers of TP and AspP, respectively; their respective AspP and VP complements are the internal temporal arguments ordered with respect to the external ones. Modal elements such as might introduce a third temporal argument into the sentence: a MOD-T (modal time) argument. The modal time expresses the (unbounded) temporal interval during which the modal assertion holds. The crucial feature of their proposal involves the interaction of the initial modal moment with the c-commanding utterance time and the c-commanded assertion time. The initial modal moment is deictically identified with utterance time, and binds the assertion time; the authors show that this simple mechanism derives the correct interpretation of sentences like Amina might have (already) left for Europe, and interacts correctly with their treatment of the continuative vs. existential ambiguity of perfect statives like Amina has lived in Europe since 1966. The analysis produces the appropriate interpretations of the ambiguity in the modal version, Amina may have lived in Europe since 1966. The crux of their analysis, however, involves the derivation of the ‘future perfect’ reading of sentences like Amina might have won the race yesterday, (but she didn’t). To capture the past-tense interpretation here, the authors propose (covert) head-movement of the perfect AFTER predicate to T8, resulting in a past-tense interpretation when the AFTER predicate is interpreted in its derived position, i.e. as a Tense, rather than an Asp. However, this yields an uninterpretable contradiction: the MOD-T, bound by utterance time, must begin at that time, but the AFTER predicate entails that the utterance time

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must follow ModT. The derivation is rescued by QR of the assertion time argument from SpecAspP to a position between ModP and TP, obviating the contradiction. Although the surface order of elements in the sentence suggests (T) > Mod > Asp, the actual order of interpretation they propose is (T) > Asp > Mod. Finally, the paper by Gue´ron, On the difference between Telicity and Perfectivity, ties together many of the themes which emerged in the other papers, within a framework which draws heavily on the interaction between the mental and the physical. Gue´ron treats events as made up of sequences of spatial configurations. Situating these configurations in time—comprehending them as individual points and filling in necessary transitions between them—requires a mental operation, a ‘psychological transform’. The TP domain, then, is a crucially psychological realm, and the VP a crucially spatial one. Gue´ron derives treatments of aspectual, temporal, and aktionsart phenomena from this framework by considering the locus of interpretation of particular morphemes—i.e. in the spatial or temporal domains—and their interaction with the bounded or unbounded meanings of their complements. She sharply discriminates (im)perfectivity, which denotes (un)boundedness at the temporal domain, from (a)telicity, which denotes (un)boundedness in the spatial domain. Cases in which the same morpheme may appear either in the spatial and temporal domain provide a particularly important motivation for the approach. Gue´ron treats the English -ed suffix and the Arabic perfective participle melody as spatial (that is, aktionsart) operators, focussing the final spatial configuration of a series of such configurations. Normally, this operator is dominated by an auxiliary verb and does not escape the VP domain, and hence the inflected verb may only function as a participle. When no auxiliary verb dominates it, though, this aktionsart operator may move to the temporal domain, in which case it can function as a true perfective morpheme, and be used in combination with the deictic T to derive a past tense. Gue´ron also extends her framework to account for the universal and existential readings of perfects in English and Bulgarian, and aspectual and quantizing particles in Russian. Taken as a whole, we found the results discussed at the conference and presented in these papers to be cause for optimism concerning the development of genuine understanding in this domain. In particular, it seemed to us that a general consensus has emerged on the syntactic representation of events and the higher temporal projections (as represented in the work of the authors at the conference and also many others, e.g. Borer, 1994, 2005; Travis, 1991, 2000, in press; Alexiadou, 1996). This usefully constrains the variety of syntactic approaches that different theorists can propose. Consequently, most of the theoretical proposals advanced here focus on the semantic interactions between these established syntactic domains, hence representing a genuine advance in the field. Despite the overall similarity between the syntactic analyses assumed by our investigators, we felt that the widely differing approaches to the semantics of these constructions represented something of a barrier to the mutual applicability of results between researchers. Each researcher tended to pursue their own individual evidence into a unique framework which was not always directly comparable to other frameworks treating some of the same data. This situation made the construction of a unified and mutually reinforcing view of the semantic issues at hand premature. This is probably natural, considering that we are still in the early phases of investigation of these complex issues within the syntactic framework that has been established, and we anticipate that such unification will develop over time. Although many of the semantic proposals made were quite different from each other in scope and specifics, a few common threads emerged. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since the Slavic preverbal particles represent the aspect/aktionsart interface problem in a very pure form, with similar

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morphosyntax but quite distinct interpretive consequences, three of the seven papers focussed directly on their analysis, and three others at least touched on them. Consequently we are hopeful that this collection of papers will be particularly useful to future investigations into these issues in Slavic. One promising connecting theme that appeared in multiple analyses is the notion that the same predicate may appear in each of the temporal, aspectual, and aktionsart domains, contributing the same information in each case but tempered by the semantics of the domain in which it finds itself. For example, Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria propose that the same ordering predicates (AFTER, BEFORE, WITHIN) appear in both the aspectual and temporal domains, differing only in the identity of their temporal arguments; if such a predicate moves from one domain to the other, its interpretation will consequently vary. Similarly, Gue´ron proposes that identical predicates have spatial interpretations within the vP but temporal interpretations when outside the vP (possessive vs. aspectual have, for example). Basilico, similarly, hangs his approach to Russian aspectual particles on whether aspectual morphology merges directly with the root, in the lowest domain, or merges above a v8 which has previously merged with the root, producing distinct interpretations. A similar theme emerges in Ramchand’s proposal concerning the parallel denotations of elements in vP, AspP and TP. Indeed, the notion that different syntactic domains are structurally and semantically comparable, employing the same syntactico-semantic primitives and the same types of operations is a current theme of broader generative theory: comparisons of DPs to CPs (e.g. Szabolcsi, 1994) or vPs (Larson and Yamakido, 2006) abound, and ‘high/low attachment’ approaches to productive vs. lexical causatives and statives are similarly prevalent (Harley, 1995; Kratzer, 1996; Marantz, 1997; Travis, 2000; Embick, 2004; Jackson, 2005; Svenonius, 2005; Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou, 2005, among others). We feel that is promising that this emerging general insight appears to be useful in this domain as well. References Alexiadou, A., 1996. Aspectual restriction on word order. Folia Linguistica 30 (1–2), 36–46. Alexiadou, A., Anagnostopoulou, E., 2005. On the syntax and morphology of Greek participles. In: Talk Presented at the Workshop on the Morphosyntax of Modern Greek, LSA Institute, July 2005. Borer, H., 1994. The projection of arguments. In: Benedicto, E.J. Runner (Eds.), Functional Projections, University of Massachuseetts Working Papers in Linguistics U, Amherst, Mass., pp. 19–47. Borer, H., 2005. Structuring sense. The Normal Course of Events, vol. II. OUP, Oxford. Demirdache, H., Uribe-Extebarria, M., 2000. The primitives of temporal relations. In: Martin, R., Michaels, D., Uriagereka, J. (Eds.), Step by Step: Essays in Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 157–186. Embick, D., 2004. On the structure of resultative participles in English. Linguistic Inquiry 35 (3), 355–392. Filip, H., 2000. The quantization puzzle. In: Tenny, C., Pustejovsky, J. (Eds.), Events as Grammatical Objects. CSLI, Stanford, pp. 39–96. Filip, H., 2003. Prefixes and delimitation of events. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 11, 55–101. Filip, H., 2004. Measures and Indefinites. Ms. SRI-Discern and Stanford University. Halle, M., Marantz, A., 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In: Hale, K., Keyser, S.J. (Eds.), The View from Building 20: Essays in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 111–176. Harley, H., 1995. Subjects, Events and Licensing. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT. Jackson, E., 2005. Derived statives in Pima. In: Paper Presented at the SSILA Annual Meeting, 7 January 2005. http:// www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/grads/ejackson/SSILA05PimaDerivedStatives.pdf. Kratzer, A., 1996. Severing the external argument from its verb. In: Rooryck, J., Zaring, L. (Eds.), Phrase Structure and the Lexicon. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 109–137.

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