The Semantics of Perfectivity

• Autores: Hana Filip
• Localización: Italian journal of linguistics, ISSN 1120-2726, Vol. 29, Nº. 1, 2017, págs. 167-200
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The grammatical category of perfective (PFV) aspect is a highly heterogeneous category, both in terms of its expression and the ways in which it is semantically delimited in natural languages. I will examine two common perspectives on a uniform semantic analysis of PFV aspect, namely, what are dubbed here a CULMINATION perspective and QUANTIZATION perspective.The former focuses on endpoints and results, while the latter, here recast in mereological terms, relates to the notion of ‘a single event seen as an unanalysed whole’. I will show that they are neither necessary nor sufficient, jointly or individually, to characterize the meaning of PFV aspect in natural languages. I will then outline a new proposal that allows us to do justice to the variety of interpretations associated with PFV forms, while at the same time identifying their shared meaning component. The proposal advocated here is that all PFV forms uniformly introduce a maximization operator MAXE on events (originally proposed by Filip and Rothstein 2005). There is a typology of MAXE operators in natural languages, all of which share the requirement of selecting the maximal STAGE (Landman 1992, 2008) of a certain eventuality type P leading to the most informative proposition in a given context; they differ, however, with respect to whether the maximal stage requirement is satisfied when stages of P-eventuality (a) culminate with respect to the culmination condition inherent in P, or (b) cease to develop at some contextually determined stage. One of the consequences of this proposal is that Landman’s (1992, 2008) ‘stage-of ’ relation does not only underlie the semantics of the English PROG , for which it was originally proposed, but also the semantics of PFV in typologically distinct languages. Moreover, in so far as MAX E yields what counts as one individuated event at a particular context, PFV turns out to be a grammatical category that is tied to one of our most basic cognitive abilities, namely out ability to individuate entities as singular discrete units