On the Compositional Nature of the Aspects

198 Pages·1972·3.873 MB·Foundations of Language 15

by  H. J. Verkuyl (auth.)

ON THE COMPOSITIONAL NATURE
OF THE ASPECTS
FOUNDATIONS OF LANGUAGE
SUPPLEMENTARY SERIES
Editors
MORRIS HALLE, MIT
P. HARTMANN, Konstanz
K. KUNJUNNI RAJA, Madras
BENSON MA TES, Univ. of California
J. F. ST AAL, Univ. of California
PIETER A. VERBURG, Groningen
JOHN W. M. VERHAAR (Secretary), Djakarta
VOLUME 15
ON THE COMPOSITIONAL NATURE
OF THE ASPECTS
by
H. J. VERK UYL
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-188006
ISBN 978-90-481-8338-8 ISBN 978-94-017-2478-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2478-4
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 1972 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland in 1972
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1972
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm,
or any other means, without written permission from the publisher
PREFACE
This book is a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts of the University of
Utrecht. It was prepared under the supervision of Prof. Dr. H. Schultink.
I would like to express my gratitude to him for his criticisms of earlier
versions which led to many improvements, in particular with respect to the
exposition of the argument.
To my co-referent Dirk van Dalen, reader in the Department of Philo
sophy (,Centrale Interfaculteit') of the University of Utrecht, I am greatly
indebted for his valuable and fruitful suggestions about problems relevant to
both linguistics and logic. Several ideas developed in this study owe their
present concrete form to our many discussions.
This thesis originates in syntactic research into the Aspects carried out
in 1967 under the supervision of Albert Kraak, professor at the University
of Nijmegen, who ever since gave much attention to my work in progress. I
am very grateful to him for his careful and stimulating criticism as well
as for the continuous support he gave me during these years.
The present study closely relates to the work of my colleague Wim
Klooster with regard to both its theoretical framework and its subject matter.
Our joint work on the measurement of duration in Dutch is an integral part
of the argument. I have greatly profited from the numerous discussions we
have had.
I am further obliged to my colleague Jan Luif and to Pieter Seuren of
Magdalen College Oxford, for their criticisms of earlier drafts and their
valuable suggestions, and to all others who have helped me in writing this
book.
Finally I want to thank Phil Hyams of the University of Amsterdam, who
unweariedly corrected my English, and Peter Nieuwenhuijsen for assisting
in compiling the index and the bibliography.
The names mentioned here do not absolve me from the responsibility for
errors that remain.
Amsterdam, July 1971 H. J. VERKUYL
CONTENTS
PREFACE V
ABSTRACT OF THE ARGUMENT IX
I. ASPECTS AS SEMANTIC PRIMITIVES
1.0. Introduction 1
1.1. Introductory Observations on Aspects 2
1.2. Aspects in Aspects 9
1.2.1. Subcategorization of Lexical Categories in Aspects 11
1.2.2. Some Objections 16
1.3. Aspects in Gruber's Base Component 29
1.3.1. Polycategorial Lexical Attachment to Semantic Trees 29
1.3.2. Inherent Subcategorization of Verbs 35
II. ASPECTS AS COMPOUND CATEGORIES
2.0. Introduction 40
2.1. Verbs and Directional Phrases 41
2.2. Strictly Transitive vs. Intransitive Verbs 46
2.3. Pseudo-Intransitive Verbs and Direct-Object Noun Phrases 49
2.4. Pseudo-Intransitive Verbs and Prepositional Phrases 53
2.4.1. PERFORM-Verbs and Abstract Nouns 54
2.4.2. TAKE-Verbs and Concrete Nouns 73
2.4.3. Verbs Occurring with the Accusativus Effectivus 85
2.5. Conclusion 96
III. THE UPPER BOUND OF THE ASPECTS
3.0. Introduction 98
3.1. The Role of the Subject and the Indirect Object in the
Composition of the Aspects 100
3.2. The Location of Durational Adverbials and the Upper
Bound of the Aspects 109
3.3. A Criterion for Verb Phrase Constituency? 118
3.3.1. Doen dat (do so)-replacement 119
3.3.2. On the Underlying Category DO 123
3.3.3. Concerning the Condition of Strict Identity on Co-
referentiality 134
VIII ON THE COMPOSITIONAL NATURE OF THE ASPECTS
3.3.4. The Underlying Structure of Action Sentences 142
3.3.5. Conclusion 155
3.4. Event-Units and Minimal Events 156
3.4.1. On the Logical Structure of Action Sentences 156
3.4.2. The 'All and Only'-Claim by Lakoff and Ross 162
3.4.3. Minimal Scope of Reference 165
3.4.4. Minimal Events and the Upper Bound of the Aspects 174
3.5. Conclusion 176
BIBLIOGRAPHY 179
INDEX 182
ABSTRACT OF THE ARGUMENT
This study aims to make for a better understanding of the term 'Aspects'
in linguistic theory. Its most current application is found in studies on
Slavonic languages. In the abundant literature on the contrast between the
Durative (or Imperfective) Aspect and the Nondurative (or Perfective)
Aspect, their occurrence has been taken to be restricted to Slavonic and some
other languages, generally speaking to languages whose Verbal systems are
morphologically characterized with regard to this opposition.
The central hypothesis of transformational-generative theory that a dis
tinction should be made between the deep structure and the surface structure
of a language, entails the possibility for morphological systematicity to
be nothing more than a manifestation of a general or even universal re
gularity expressed, for example, in the syntactic component of grammers of
other languages. It will be shown in this study that the opposition between
the two Aspects is present in Dutch, and as can be seen from the translated
material, also in English, and that it should be described as the expression
of regularities of a primarily syntactic-semantic nature.
In Chapter One I shall discuss the plausibility of the view that in non
Slavonic languages generalizations can be made pertaining to phenomena
which in Slavonic grammars are generally accounted for in terms of the con
trast between the Durative and Nondurative Aspects. As this opposition
should be related to the possibility for Durational Adverbials to occur in
some sentences and to their exclusion from others, it follows that we cannot
consider the Aspects free from selectional relations between these Ad
verbials and the constituents to which the term 'Aspects' applies.
In Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) we meet the claim
that Durational Adverbials relate selectionally to Verbs, an opinion which in
fact links up with the traditional assumption mentioned above that the
Aspects should be assigned to Verbs. Even if we take into consideration
recent modifications made by Chomsky in Remarks on Nominalization
(1968a) many inadequacies inherent to the model proposed in Aspects make
it rather senseless to pursue other ways of remedying its inherent limitations,
notably with respect to the status of Prepositional Phrases, to the organiza
tion and the function of the lexicon and to the specification of Verbs and
Nouns.
Gruber's abandonment of the principle of monocategorial lexical at-
X ON THE COMPOSITIONAL NATURE OF THE ASPECTS
tachment which states that for every lexical item there is just one categorial
node in deep structure to which it can be attached, as well as his basic as
sumption that no essential difference should be made between syntax and
semantics at the level of deep structural representation, should be seen as a
basic contribution to what in the work of Lakoff, Ross, McCawley, Postal
and others has been developed as an alternative to Chomsky's original and
modified conception of transformational-generative theory.
Since Gruber's work is relatively explicit as to the application of the
principle of polycategorial lexical attachment, which allows lexical items
to be attached to more than one category of the base, and since in his gram
mar Verbs can inherently be specified in terms of semantic primitives, his
framework opens up perspectives for an adequate account of the Aspects
in grammar. A brief survey of Gruber's basic assumptions applied to the
main theme of this study will follow the refutation of the Aspects-model
and its extrapolations.
In Chapter 2 the compositional nature of the Aspects will be demonstrat
ed with the help of a number of outwardly diverse sentences, all of which
allow for the same generalization regarding the position of Durational
Adverbials. The Durative and the Nondurative Aspects in these sentences
appear to be composed of a Verbal subcategory on the one hand and a con
figuration of categories of a nominal nature on the other. Accordingly
they can be represented by schemata. Sentences like *H ij speelde een uur
lang het cel/oconcert van Schumann (lit: He played Schumann's cello
concerto for an hour), *Greetje wandelde urenlang een kilometer (lit:
Greetje walked a kilometre for hours), *D e muis at een weeklang de kaas
(lit: The mouse ate the cheese for a week), *H ij hoorde urenlang dat De
Gaulle was over/eden (lit: He heard for hours that De Gaulle had died),
*D e chirurg genas een maandlang een hartp atient (lit: Rhe surgeon cured a
heart patient for a month), can all be analyzed on the basis of the following
Nondurative scheme: v[VERB]v+NP[SPECIFIED QUANTITY OF X]NP.
The asterisk is used to indicate that these sentences are ungrammatical in
their single-event reading; they can, however, be interpreted as expressing
frequency, though somewhat unnaturally. The category VERB represents
one of the categories MOVEMENT, PERFORM, TAKE, ADD TO,
TRANSITION, DO, etc., whereas the categories SPECIFIED QUANTITY
OF X pertain to the countability, finiteness, or delimitation ofX. Thus a cello
concerto when performed should be conceived of as a finite piece of musical
information, a kilometre when covered as a limited quantity of distance
measuring units, a slice of bread when eaten as a specified portion of bread,
and so on.
Sentences like Hij speelde een uurlang cellomuziek (He played cello music
ABSTRACT OF THE ARGUMENT IX
for an hour), Greetje wandelde urenlang (Greetje walked for hours), De muis
at een week lang van de kaas (The mouse ate from the cheese for a week), De
muis at een weeklang kaas (The mouse ate cheese for a week), De chirurg genas
een maandlang hartpatfenten (For a month the surgeon cured heart patients)
and Hij hoorde urenlang praten over De Gaulle's dood (He heard people
talking about De Gaulle's death for hours) all fit into the Durative scheme
v[VERB]v+NP[UNSPECIFIED QUANTITY OF X]NP. Eating from the
cheese is to take (separate) an unspecified quantity of cheese from a (speci
fied) quantity of cheese; music can be played for a virtually infinite time, and
given the eternal life of Greetje she can walk infinitely. The surgeon
restricted himself for a month to curing only members of the set of heart
patients. In all these cases the termination of the events is dependent on
the length of the stretch of time given in the Durational Adverbials.
In Chapter 3 it will be shown that the Indirect Object, as well as the Subject
of the sentence, is also involved in the composition of the Aspects. Thus,
in the latter case there is an opposition between sentences like *E r stroomt
urenlang een liler water uit de rots (lit: There is streaming a litre of water
out of that rock for hours) and a sentence like Er stroomt urenlang water uit
de rots (Water is streaming out of that rock for hours), which can be ex
plained in terms of the schemata above. That is to say, the term 'Aspects'
applies to configurations of categories of the following form NP[(UN)SPE
CIFIED QUANTITY OF X]Np+vp[v[VERB]v (+NP[(UN)SPECIFIED
QUANTITY OF X]NP)]VP. This very fact invites the question of where
the upper bound of the Aspects should be located. Since there are
selectional restrictions between the categories fitting into the Nondurative
scheme and Durational Adverbials, it can safely be assumed that those con
stituents which are located "higher" than Durational Adverbials are not
involved in the composition of the Aspects. Therefore attention will be
given to the status of Durational Adverbials in underlying structure.
In Klooster and Verkuyl (1971) it is argued that sentences containing the
Verb duren (last) and those containing Durational Adverbials having an
Indefinite Determiner are transformationally derived from one underlying
source. Both duren plus its Specifying Complement and the Durational Ad
verbial can be considered the Verb Phrase of a sentential structure whose
Subject is an embedded S referring to events. In other words, these
Durational Adverbials can be taken as predications over events. The rule
transforming the underlying Predicate into a Durational Adverbial is called
Adverbialization.
The Nondurative scheme can be used as a constraint on this transforma
tional rule. This constraint states that if the sentential Subject of a sentence is
specified as referring to one single event and if this Subject S dominates