The Parameter of Aspect / Edition 2

by C.S. Smith

Overview

While working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation. for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycho linguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. A National Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation Theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, also gave me time to pursue this project. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Osten Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentless comments and questions throughout. People with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. lowe a special debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real differ­ ence to the final form of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including colloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and University of Tel Aviv. I thank Adrienne Diehr and Marjorie Troutner for their efficient and good-humored help throughout the work on the first edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780792346593
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	08/31/1997
Series:	Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy , #43
Edition description:	2nd ed. 1997
Pages:	353
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.45(h) x 0.03(d)

Table of Contents

I.- 1: The Approach.- 2: Situation Aspect.- 3: The Linguistic Realization of the Situation Types.- 4: Viewpoint Aspect.- 5: Temporal Location.- 6: The Formal Analysis of Temporal Meaning.- 7: Aspectual Meaning in Discourse Representation Theory.- II Introduction To Part II.- 8: The Aspectual System of English.- 9: The Aspectual System of French.- 10: The Aspectual System of Russian with Gilbert Rappaport.- 11: The Aspectual System of Mandarin Chinese.- 12: The Aspectual System of Navajo.- References.- General Index.- Name Index.

Editorial Reviews

"The book is well organized and easy to follow. In conclusion this work is an important contribution to the study of aspect. The first edition of the book became one of the basic works on aspect, cited by many and used as a textbook by some. I believe this edition will gain the same respect."

(Pragmatics & Cognition, 8:2 (2000)

From the Publisher

Smith (linguistics, U. of Texas) presents a unified theory of aspect within Universal Grammar. She provides an unusual combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches to a single domain; and gives detailed linguistic analyses of the very different aspect systems in English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Navajo, and Russian. After presenting her evidence, she develops a formal semantic treatment in the framework of discourse representation theory with an explicit procedure for computing aspect meaning from syntactical surface structure. Among her innovations are a principled account of the interaction between viewpoint and situation type, a level of pragmatic analysis at which contrastive and inferred meanings are stated, and a default analysis of sentences that are neither perfective nor imperfective in viewpoint. No date is noted for the first edition, but the second incorporates further developments of the two-component theory such as new treatments of boundedness and dynamism, and a general account of aspect shifts. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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