Talk by Markus Egg
Aspect and Quantification: an Iterative Approach
This paper aims at unifying two diverging trends of aspectual
semantics in an iterative analysis. These trends seem to contradict
each other in the aspectual classification of verbs like 'to eat':
Krifka (1992) or Verkuyl (1995) assign no aspectual class to these
verbs in isolation. Instead, the aspect of whole verbal projections is
calculated. The influence of DP arguments (semantically, generalized
quantifiers) is considered in this calculation. But researchers like
Vendler (1967) and Dowty (1979) classify verbs like 'to eat' without
taking into account the influence of different kinds of DP arguments.
Reconciliating these trends allows extending the coverage of aspectual
theories to expressions whose classification was problematic till now,
e.g., verbal projections with universal quantifiers.
Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995