Introduction

Aspect is a linguistic category pertaining to what Comrie (1976) calls ‘different ways of viewing the internal temporal constitution of a situation’ (pp. 3–5). Aspect is frequently discussed along with tense and modality (often under rubric of the acronym TAM, standing for ‘tense-aspect-modality/ mood’), possibly because all three of these are generally expressed either via verbal inflections or via periphrastic forms including auxiliary verbs (Dahl and Velupillai, 2011). Tense and aspect markers are usually interpreted as operators on VP meanings, while mood/modality are markers more usually taken to express operations on propositional meanings. However, it is often difficult to decide which TAM category a particular marker expresses because these categories frequently overlap, as, for example, in the case of the English perfect (e.g. have eaten) and the French imparfait, which express both tense and aspect.

Assume, following Parsons (1990), Landman (2000) and many others, that verbs and predicates headed by verbs denote sets of events. Tense gives the temporal location of the events denoted by the verbal predicate, usually in relation to a given reference point. In contrast, aspectual properties of a verbal predicate reflect the internal temporal make-up of the situations or events denoted by the predicate, for example, whether the predicate denotes events which hold at an interval or at a point. Modality, although it may be marked morphologically on a verb, indicates in which possible worlds the truth of a proposition is to be evaluated.

Verbs and the phrases projected by a verbal head are of the same semantic type, since all verbal projections denote sets of events. This means that both verbs and VPs have aspectual properties, although not all aspectual properties apply at both levels of projection. Aspectual properties include (i) the lexical aspect or aspectual class or Aktionsart of the head of the verbal predicate, (ii) the telicity or atelicity of the predicate and (iii) the grammatical aspect of the VP, in particular whether it is perfective or imperfective. The lexical aspect of the verb, termed ‘situation aspect’ in Smith (1991), is determined by the properties of the event type it denotes, for example, whether it is a state, a change of state or a process.