Aspect, Eventuality Types, and Nominal Reference

This book examines the interplay between the semantics of noun phrases and verbal predicates, with an emphasis on data drawn from Czech and English, and comparisons to German and Finnish. The primary focus is on shifts in readings assigned to verbal predicates between event-readings and process-readings, often called 'aspect shift' or 'coercion', and how these shifts are related to the semantics of constituent noun phrases. The book examines quantificational and definite interpretations of determinerless noun phrases in Czech that are induced by the semantics of grammatical aspect (perfective and imperfective), and by semantic properties of verbal affixes.Three main these are defended in this book. The first is that grammatical aspect and eventuality types (state, event, and process) are related in so far as some of their semantic properties can be modeled in terms of mereological 'part-of' relation (her, as a complete join semilattice), and this is what accounts for their systematic interactions. A second thesis is that the thematic structure of verbs governs the seemingly disparate ways in which the interactions between verbal predicates and nominal arguments are manifested. And third, we can provide a unified analysis for the various interactions between verbal predicates and nominal arguments within a constraint-based (or unification-based) approach to natural language description. The book also gives a detailed analysis of certain verbal affixes (chiefly prefixes) in Slavic languages, arguing that they have the semantic properties of quantifiers, with the variable (event or individual) they bind also determined by the thematic structure of verbs.This book will be of interestto a wide range of linguists concerned with aspect and how it interacts with lexical semantics, morphology, syntax and quantification.