Aspectual Shifts With and Without Type Conflict

摘要

The paper offers a new type of approach to the semantic phenomenon of adverbial aspect shift. It accounts for standard data that resisted a full theoretical explanation so far and deals with some challenging new data, moreover. The paper develops a new type of approach within the framework of finite-state temporal semantics. According to the proposal made here, temporal prepositions are dynamic presuppositions that can aspectually underspecify a situational concept. Furthermore, the new concept of semantic phase is introduced as an instance of the principle of hierarchical abstraction. Aspectual shifts are treated as reflecting context dependence of adverbial modification, either on the level of sentence internal composition or on the level of discourse. The simple shifting algorithm used derives the correct set of possible readings on the basis of lexical semantic input only, and, furthermore, may claim cognitive plausibility.