Aspect and quantification: an iterative approach

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to the aspectual influence of DP arguments in order to unify two diverging traditions of aspectual semantics, which seem to contradict each other in the aspectual classification of verbs like to eat: [Krifka 1992] or [Verkuyl 1995] assign no aspectual class to these verbs in isolation. Instead, the aspect of whole verbal projections of these verbs is calculated. The influence of DP arguments (semantically, generalized quantifiers) is considered in this calculation. But linguists like [Vendler 1967] and [Dowty 1979] classify verbs like to eat without taking into account the influence of different kinds of DP arguments. These two traditions are reconciled in terms of the proposed approach. It is based on an elaborate notion of iteration that involves pragmatic reasoning in a well-defined way. The coverage of aspectual theories can be extended in this approach to expressions whose classification was problematic till now, e.g., expressions like to see twenty zebras or verbal projections with the quantifier all the.