Henk J. Verkuyl – författare

Sentences may pertain to states or processes or events. They may express duration, frequency, habituality, and many other forms of temporality. How do they do this? It is the aspectual properties of sentences in natural languages which allow the user to express a temporal structure, and Henk Verkuyl presents a unified formal system to account for them. He explains aspectuality in terms of the opposition between terminative aspect and durative aspect, and describes the way in which terminative aspect is compositionally formed on the basis of semantic information expressed by different syntactic elements, in particular the verb and its arguments. The aim is to determine which semantic conditions make a sentence terminative; but at least ten different forms of durative aspectuality are also treated. All are drawn into a theory which can account for both terminative and durative aspectuality together. A Theory of Aspectuality draws together into a coherent whole the author's thinking on the subject over the last twenty years, and will interest all those working on aspect and the semantics of noun phrases. It promises to be a major new contribution to our understanding of the subject.

Bringing together fifty years' worth of cross-linguistic research, this pioneering monograph explores the complex interaction between tense, mood and aspect. It looks at the long way of combining elementary semantic units at the bottom of phrase structure up to and including the top of a sentence. Rejecting ternary tense as blocking compositionality, it introduces three levels obtained by binary tense oppositions.  It also counters an outdated view on motion by assuming that change is not expressed as having an inherent goal but rather as dynamic interaction between different number systems that allows us to package information into countable and continuous units. It formally identifies the central role of a verb in a variety of argument structures and integrates adverbial modifiers into the compositional structure at different tense levels of phrase structure. This unique contribution to the field will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers in the syntax-semantics interface.

Bringing together fifty years' worth of cross-linguistic research, this pioneering monograph explores the complex interaction between tense, mood and aspect. It looks at the long way of combining elementary semantic units at the bottom of phrase structure up to and including the top of a sentence. Rejecting ternary tense as blocking compositionality, it introduces three levels obtained by binary tense oppositions.  It also counters an outdated view on motion by assuming that change is not expressed as having an inherent goal but rather as dynamic interaction between different number systems that allows us to package information into countable and continuous units. It formally identifies the central role of a verb in a variety of argument structures and integrates adverbial modifiers into the compositional structure at different tense levels of phrase structure. This unique contribution to the field will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers in the syntax-semantics interface.

The aim of this book is two-fold: to offer a retrospective view on the past thirty years of research on aspectuality and temporality as well as to develop new perspectives on the future development of the field. Articles contain overviews of the development of the field and/or present the state of the art of current research, suggesting new and upcoming lines of research. An important theme throughout the book is typological variation, and the relevance of empirical data for theory formation.Together the articles in the book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of English, and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nakh-Daghestanian languages.Audience: Scholars and students of aspectuality in semantics and at the syntax-semantics interface.

The aim of this book is two-fold: to offer a retrospective view on the past thirty years of research on aspectuality and temporality as well as to develop new perspectives on the future development of the field. Articles contain overviews of the development of the field and/or present the state of the art of current research, suggesting new and upcoming lines of research. An important theme throughout the book is typological variation, and the relevance of empirical data for theory formation.Together the articles in the book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of English, and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nakh-Daghestanian languages.Audience: Scholars and students of aspectuality in semantics and at the syntax-semantics interface.