An Algorithm for Adverbial Aspect Shift

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008), pages 289–296 Manchester, August 2008 An Algorithm for Adverbial Aspect Shift Sabine Gr¨under Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig Johannisgasse 26, 04103 Leipzig, Germany gruender@uni-leipzig.de Abstract The paper offers a new type of approach to the semantic phenomenon of adverbial aspect shift within the framework of finite- state temporal semantics. The heart of the proposal is a supervaluational concept of underspecification, and the idea of treat- ing the meanings of temporal prepositions as dynamic presuppositions. The simple shifting algorithm used in the present ap- proach derives the correct set of possible readings on the basis of lexical semantic input only, and, furthermore, may claim cognitive plausibility. 1 Introduction The referents of temporally determined sentences are usually talked of as situations. The traditional ontological classification schema (Vendler, 1957) divides up the respective situational types into at least four abstract subclasses: states, activities, ac- complishments and achievements. This aspectual taxonomy takes into account the internal temporal structure of the situations, and is based on a small number of features, such as: telic, dynamic, dura- tive. Situations are referred to by verbal phrases. Dif- ferences in truth conditions, presuppositions and entailments of the respective sentences, as well as effects on temporal sequencing in discourse are plausibly built on the aforementioned structural differences. That the assumed ontological aspec- tual classification is reflected on linguistic level is (at least partly) borne out by a number of language c⃝ 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported li- cense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). Some rights reserved. internal testing procedures, such as grammaticality effects in connection with imperative, progressive, pseudo cleft and adverbial constructions. The aspectual character of a verbal phrase is not solely fixed on the basis of verbal lexical informa- tion but can change during the process of semantic composition under the influence of nominal argu- ments and prepositional phrases, tense and aspec- tual markers, aspectual auxiliaries, or temporal ad- verbials. Accordingly, the aim of a theory of as- pect is to determine the aspectual characteristics of complex verbal phrases on the basis of semantic information associated with certain of its parts. In the last thirty years, considerable progress has been made in formally describing the aspec- tual contribution of nominal and prepositional ar- guments. However as far as the aspectual behav- ior of temporal adverbials is concerned, some puz- zling sets of data still await proper explanation and appropriate formalization. The observation that problems arise right at that point gets particularly worrying given that the very same types of ex- amples are standardly used as linguistic test cases to differentiate telic from atelic verbal phrases. Therefore, if we could find significant problems with the theory just here, the whole idea of a lan- guage internal criterion for the division of verbal expressions according to the aspectual situational schema would suddenly become vague and un- grounded. The troublesome examples under discussion test for compatibility of a verbal phrase with “for” and “in”-adverbials. According to …

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