Building Up Aspect

The Author: Maria Stambolieva is head of the Electronic Archive of the Bulgarian language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and lecturer of Bulgarian language at the «Jean Moulin» University in Lyon, France. Her interests and work are in the field of syntax and semantics, structural linguistics, corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. She has worked on a number of large-scale national and international linguistic projects and is a pioneer of computer-assisted corpus linguistics in Bulgaria.

This book addresses the problems of the nature of the category of aspect, its formal expression and its relation to Action modes, to the Aorist/Imperfect and Perfect/Non-Perfect distinctions. The discussion is largely based on data from Bulgarian - a Slavonic language where aspect as a grammatical category systematically coexists not only with verbal prefixation, but also with temporal boundedness, correlation and, in the nominal sphere, definiteness. Cross-language parallels with English and French data and the mapping of Bulgarian structures to notions drawn from the "western" tradition of aspectual study result in the outline of a framework for an integrated study of the expression of aspectuality in languages belonging to different language groups. Refuting existing views of aspect as a "compensatory" phenomenon for nominal definiteness, the book presents arguments in favour of a systematic relation between verbal prefixation and NP quantification in Slavonic languages and of a compositional, syntactic dimension of aspectual analysis.

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Contents: Bulgarian language - The Slavonic category of aspect - Perfective and imperfective verbs - The notion of change in interval semantics - The "stative" verb, aspect and action mode - Aspect and tense - The aorist/imperfect distinction - The aspect/temporal boundedness distinction - Aspect and quantification - Action mode and syntactic structure.