This book studies the linguistic representation of events by examining the relevance of two salient event characteristics-- telicity and durativity-- to the grammatical system of natural language. The study of events, and of event characteristics, is an important testing ground for theories on the boundary between extralinguistic and linguistic knowledge, and on the relation between semantics and syntax. Telicity and durativity are notions which have become increasingly influential in both the semantic and the syntactic, i.e., grammaticalized, representation of events. The book furthers the understanding of events through the comparison of two genetically and typologically distinct languages, German and Dëne Suliné (Chipewyan/Athapaskan), an indigenous language of Northwestern Canada. It contains the first in-depth documentation of the aspectual system of Dëne Suliné, and a careful analysis of the aspectual behaviour of German particle verbs. A stringent methodology considers semantic, pragmatic, and grammatical factors in both languages. The data reveal that telicity and durativity belong to profoundly different semantic and grammatical domains, and that neither notion is grammaticalized universally. While both notions are represented semantically in German as well as in Dëne Suliné, telicity is grammaticalized only in the former and durativity is grammaticalized only in the latter.

This dissertation presents a study on the acquisition of telicity by Spanish and English native speakers. In addition to the study of acquisition, it investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of locatum constructions (e.g., the water filled the bucket), which are sentences that contain two internal arguments and whose subject is non-agentive. This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic properties of elements of the verb phrase that had not been previously considered in the interpretation of telicity, such as the role of non-agentive subjects and the type of movement that takes place in the checking of the verb's telic features. Contrary to the assumption that only the direct internal argument of the verb can delimit an event, I argue that objects generated in the lower verb phrase, by virtue of being an internal argument of the verb can delimit an event. An object delimits an event by checking the verb's telic features in spec-AspP, either by covert or overt movement. If a predicate contains one internal argument (e.g., the boy filled the bucket) the checking of the verb's telic features takes place via covert movement. That is, only the NPs specific quantification features move covertly to check the verb's telic features in spec-AspP. However, if the predicate contains two internal arguments (e.g., fill the bucket with water), the surfaced subject (e.g., the water filled the bucket) by virtue of being an internal argument of the verb, checks the verb's telic features as the category and its features move overtly to subject position. The study shows that young children understand telicity when the verb's telic features are checked via overt movement, but have difficulties understanding telicity when the verb's telic features are checked via covert movement. I propose that predicates whose telicity involves overt movement should be acquired earlier than predicates whose telicity involves covert movement because overt movement is an operation that happens between D-structure and S-structure before the sentence is pronounced. Predicates whose telicity involves covert movement might be acquired at a later age of development because covert movement happens between S-structure and LF after the sentence is pronounced.

First Published in 1997. This work studies two related phenomena in human language: the ability of verbs and other lexical items to describe how a situation (event or state) develops or holds in time (LEXICAL ASPECT) and the view some verbal auxiliaries and affixes present of the development or result of a situation at a given time (GRAMMATICAL ASPECT). Through this investigation the author seeks to reveal a formal situation structure represented by aspectual phenomena, a structure to which other linguistic elements make reference, particularly tense. This structure describes the semantics of aspect and provides a principled input to pragmatic aspectual interpretation.

During the period I have been working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation, for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. ANational Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, allowed me time to pursue this project. I also thank the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Texas for research support. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Östen Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentIess comments and questions throughout. The individuals with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real difference to the working out of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including cOlloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and the University of Tel Aviv.

Much recent influential work within Generative grammar argues that syntax plays a key role in grammar and meaning composition, whereas the role of the lexicon is minimal. This book provides evidence that supports a more balanced division of labor between syntax and the lexicon in the creation of meaning. The author argues that grammatical theory can only ignore lexical meaning at its own peril and defends a theoretical standpoint which is underrepresented in much of the current work in this area . This book explores a wide range of relevant empirical data and makes a compelling case for a theory that can make adequate predictions about possible linguistic structures by allowing the lexicon and the grammar to dynamically interact and impose restrictions on each other.

Island phenomena are a central topic in generative grammar, especially because of principled exceptions to these general extraction constraints. This volume investigates exceptional extractions from phrasal adjunct islands. It argues, based on experimental studies, that several factors identified in the previous literature are uninformative about locality conditions because they show effects in both extraction and non-extraction sentence forms. The volume develops a multifactorial model to account for these effects without appealing to universal extraction conditions and argues that the relative acceptability of the underlying proposition determines acceptability across sentence types.