conf. GUERON 25/2

[Bridget Copley]

Le programme "Temporalité: Typologie et Acquisition" (temptypac) de la
Fédération "Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques" du CNRS a le plaisir
d'annoncer un exposé:

Jacqueline GUERON (Paris 3) :  "On the Parameter of Aspect"

Date : lundi 25 fév 2008
Lieu : 59 rue Pouchet, salle 159
Heure : 10h00-12h00
Métro : ligne 13, Guy Moquet ou Brochant

Un plan d'accès se trouve à :
http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/article.php3?id_article=86

Vous pouvez consulter le site web de temptypac à :
http://www.ivry.cnrs.fr/~7023web/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=31


Résumé :


     This talk presents work in progress in collaboration with  
Svetlana Vogeleer on Aspect in French and Russian. I attempt to  
situate some of Vogeleer's semantic hypotheses in a syntactic framework.
     I assume that deictic tense interpretation involves the mapping  
of a situation described in vP onto the point of time which the T node  
denotes. This point of time is contained in an interval of time  
associated with the CP domain.
    If we assume that vP can describe all the Venderlian event types  
in all languages, and that similarly all languages can, in one way or  
anther,  point to the three semantic  times, Present, Past, and  
Future, the question becomes "Why do sentence structures expressing  
temporal interpretation vary so much  from one language to another"?
   For instance, the Russian imperfective past in (1a) translates into  
French as either (progressive) (1b) or (anterior) (1c).
  (1) a. Masha ela jabloki.
         b. Masha mangeait des pommes,
         c. Masha a mangé des pommes.
    I will assume that  the difference between languages is to be  
found in the grammar of Aspect which is based on a (small) set of  
functional morphemes affixed to V or merged with vP either in the vP  
domain or in a higher Aspect domain.
    Vogeleer describes two different approaches to aspect, each of   
which is  appropriate for different language types. The "point of  
view" or  temporal approach is  appropriate for Romance languages,  
while the "quantization" approach is appropriate for Slavic languages.
   I will propose that these two approaches may be associated with  
distinct syntactic levels of Aspect, independent of aktionsart , which  
determine tense interpretation in different ways. Each level is  
available in principle in any language and a language may use a  
mixture of the two.
    For morphological  Aspect, in  vP itself,  grammatical morphemes  
merged with V in the lexicon or in morphology determine the quantized  
or cumulative internal structure of the event. This structure is then  
predicated directly of the time line in T.This mapping  gives the  
progressive reading of imperfectives, which are cumulative.
     There may be an intermediate level of  "point of view"  Aspect.  
This seems to be a kind of nominalized or  participial level,  in  
which   a syntactic morpheme, the participial head,  maps the entire  
event  vP defines onto some point of time relative to (that is,  
before, after, or simultaneous with ) a not-yet identified higher   
point of time. The higher  point of time may be either the evaluation  
time in T  or the reference time interval in Comp.
   Suppose either strategy is available in Russian. If a  cumulative  
vP  is mapped directly onto a past evaluation time, Russian (1a)  
translates as French (1b). Suppose the Russian vP may alternatively be  
construed as a nominalized participial   form predicated onto a  
relative point of time. If the participial form is mapped onto a  
present time interval, as it is overtly in French (1c) in its  
experiential construal, then we can understand why Russian (1a) may  
also be equivalent to  (1c).
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