This book is a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Utrecht. It was prepared under the supervision of Prof. Dr. H. Schultink. I would like to express my gratitude to him for his criticisms of earlier versions which led to many improvements, in particular with respect to the exposition of the argument. To my co-referent Dirk van Dalen, reader in the Department of Philo sophy (,Centrale Interfaculteit') of the University of Utrecht, I am greatly indebted for his valuable and fruitful suggestions about problems relevant to both linguistics and logic. Several ideas developed in this study owe their present concrete form to our many discussions. This thesis originates in syntactic research into the Aspects carried out in 1967 under the supervision of Albert Kraak, professor at the University of Nijmegen, who ever since gave much attention to my work in progress. I am very grateful to him for his careful and stimulating criticism as well as for the continuous support he gave me during these years. The present study closely relates to the work of my colleague Wim Klooster with regard to both its theoretical framework and its subject matter. Our joint work on the measurement of duration in Dutch is an integral part of the argument. I have greatly profited from the numerous discussions we have had.

A linguistic view of how natural language speakers package and open information, to deal with the expression of time.

This monograph pursues a structural analogy between the availability of an existential interpretation in states and the telicity of events. Focusing on evidence from both verbal and adjectival predicates, it argues that quantization forms the basis of a unified theory of aktionsart and provides a theory in which the availability of an existential interpretation in states is, like the telicity of events, determined compositionally by the predicate and the quantization of its internal argument. Quantization is further argued to reflect the internal temporal constitution of the stages of an individual which is tied to the generation of an existential interpretation. This monograph will be of interest to syntacticians and semanticists who are specifically concerned with compositional approaches to eventualities, and to those who have a more general interest in the role linguistic theory can play in determining core properties of the mind.

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.

Since at least Verkuyl (1972), aktionsart has been considered a property of phrasal configurations minimally resulting from a combination of a predicate and its internal argument. This has been demonstrated most clearly in the literature on telicity where certain predicate-argument configurations allow for a telic interpretation while others permit only an atelic interpretation. The properties shared by nominals and events and the manner of their composition has been the source of much debate, leading to a rich literature on the composition of events. Largely left out of this debate, however, has been the role that arguments might play, if any at all, in the composition of states. This dissertation explores the role arguments and predicates play in determining the availability of an existential interpretation of a stative subject, one property distinguishing between the stage-level and individual-level behavior of predicates. It develops a theory of aktionsart in which quantization, the opposition of quantized and homogeneous structures, plays a central role in determining the aspectual behavior of stative predicates. It argues that the distinction between stage-level and individual-level states is determined compositionally, taking into account properties of the predicate, both verbal and adjectival, and its arguments. I begin by observing two empirical puzzles which affect the availability of existential interpretation: the effects of internal arguments in verbal statives first observed in Fernald (1994) and the scale structure effects of adjectival predicates. Pursuing an analogy between the availability of existential interpretation in states and telicity in events, I explore the possible role verbs in stative predicates play in determining the existential interpretation of their subject, ultimately arguing that there are no individual-level or stage-level verbs. I then turn to the role played by verbal arguments in stative predicates. I propose, in opposition to topic-comment theories of the internal argument effects, that the quantization of the object of transitive stative verbs determines whether they license an existential interpretation of their subject. Predicates with quantized objects license an existential interpretation, while those with homogeneous objects do not. Given the structural analogy between the availability of existential interpretation and telicity, I propose that stative and eventive predicates are composed by the same mechanisms, with the distinction between states and events arising from the selectional restrictions on Voice, following Kratzer (1996, 2004). I then turn to adjectival predicates and the observation that their scale structure influences the availability of existential interpretation. I demonstrate that scale structure is a type of quantization (closed scales are quantized; open scales are homogeneous) and argue that this compositionally determines their stage-level/individual-level behavior. I further consider the role arguments play in determining the availability of existential interpretation, observing that, as with telicity, the quantization of arguments affects a predicate's stage-level/individual-level behavior. The dissertation closes with an overview of its content and presents a highly speculative discussion on the role played by quantization in language and the possible role it may play in vision, suggesting that quantization may be a core component of cognition more generally. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest llc. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.].

Based on an earlier edition published in 1992 in Bulgarian, this book offers a specific approach to one of the most controversial problems in linguistics. According to it, aspect is the result of a subtle and complex interplay between the referents of verbs and nouns in the sentence. This volume is of interest to researchers of aspect and related problems, theoretical and applied linguists, psycholinguists, philosophers of language, graduate students of general linguistics, English (Germanic), and Bulgarian (Slavic).

This book presents the statistical analysis of compositional data using the log-ratio approach. It includes a wide range of classical and robust statistical methods adapted for compositional data analysis, such as supervised and unsupervised methods like PCA, correlation analysis, classification and regression. In addition, it considers special data structures like high-dimensional compositions and compositional tables. The methodology introduced is also frequently compared to methods which ignore the specific nature of compositional data. It focuses on practical aspects of compositional data analysis rather than on detailed theoretical derivations, thus issues like graphical visualization and preprocessing (treatment of missing values, zeros, outliers and similar artifacts) form an important part of the book. Since it is primarily intended for researchers and students from applied fields like geochemistry, chemometrics, biology and natural sciences, economics, and social sciences, all the proposed methods are accompanied by worked-out examples in R using the package robCompositions.