Aspectual Composition and Sentence Interpretation: A formal approach
Diego Mollá · 1997
This thesis is principally concerned with aspectual composition. Although there have been some recent studies on this topic, none has succeeded in explaining all the different aspectual interactions existing between a verb and its arguments. This thesis explores the interpretation of sentences containing transitive or intransitive verbs and their arguments. It is found that sentence interpretation (in terms of distributive and collective readings) together with a speaker's linguistic knowledge of the world plays a decisive role in determining the aspectual interaction between a verb and its arguments. An important part in this thesis is the study of predicate properties. The parallelism between the domain of objects and that of events is stressed by defining a set of properties which may apply to predicates over both domains, namely quantisation and homogeneity. The analysis is formalised by means of lattices which represent our linguistic knowledge of the structure of the world. Obje...