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The notions of subject matter and aboutness have been objects of considerable attention among philosophers over the last few years. Current theories of subject matter take sentences to be the primary bearers of subject matter: "sentences have aboutness properties if anything has" (Yablo, Aboutness, Princeton University Press, 2014). However, some subsentential expressions can also be thought of as being about something. Moreover, it appears that the subject matters of sentences depend in a systematic way on the aboutness properties of their subsentential components. In this paper, we focus on the question of what predicates are about. We provide an account of predicative subject matter in which subject matters are assigned to predicates in a natural way, and which can be smoothly integrated with some existing accounts of sentential subject matter. We also argue that the notion of predicative subject matter is a worthy object of study, both within the current debate on subject matter and in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Klein () points out that within the treatment of the temporal semantics of English that he proposes, there is no need to maintain the traditional distinction between perfect aspect and anterior tense. An analysis of the semantics of perfect aspect in terms of placing the topic time in the post-time of the event under description can account for the anterior tense readings of the pluperfect as well. In this article, I argue that 'Klein's Conjecture' appears more problematic once extended to other languages, drawing on evidence from Japanese, Kituba, Kalaallisut, Korean, and Yucatec Maya. Languages such as Japanese have expressions of anterior tense that do not fit Klein's analysis of perfect aspect (topic time after event time), while others-e.g., Yucatec Maya-have expressions that fit Klein's analysis, but do not have anterior tense readings. The additions to Klein's theory necessary so it can accommodate the new evidence comprise a revised viewpoint aspect component that distinguishes not only relations between topic and event time, but also relations between topic time and the runtimes of states preceding and following the event in a causal chain, as well as an updated tense module that distinguishes relations between topic time and perspective times in addition to relations between topic time and utterance time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does grammar represent simultaneity? More precisely, how do grammatical representations of sentences indicate that two events or situations are located at the same time? This is a question of central importance for the theory of tense and aspect, and one to which Hamida Demirdache and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria (Nat. Lang. Linguist. Theory, doi:, ) (D&UE) propose some provocative new answers. Their empirical focus is the semantics of perfective, imperfective, and progressive aspect in French and Spanish, with special attention to the temporal semantics of modal verbs, but their account has broader implications for the theory of simultaneous time reference and the imperfective/perfective distinction in general. In these remarks, I discuss certain implications of their main proposal and its implementation. Specifically, I examine their idea that the principal semantic distinction between perfective and imperfective viewpoint aspect involves a contrast between coreference or covaluation (with perfective aspect) and semantic binding (with imperfective aspect). D&UE assume that the perfective/imperfective contrast is aspectual, and structurally parallel to perfect and progressive aspect; they implement the coreference versus binding distinction in terms of the relation between two aspectual time coordinates (the Assertion Time and the Event Time). I point out some problems that arise under these assumptions, and propose an alternative implementation of the coreference versus binding distinction at the higher level of tense. I then explore empirical implications of this approach for perfective versus imperfective tenses in ellipsis contexts, involving strict versus sloppy identity in temporal reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the case of Spanish Perfecto simple and Imperfecto from the perspective of the cross-linguistic proposal in Altshuler's () 'A typology of partitive aspectual operators', pointing to ways in which the Spanish data suggests refinements for Altshuler's proposal. In particular: (i) the paper provides evidence from Spanish that sheds doubts on Altshuler's proposal that temporal asymmetry should be built into the semantics of Landman-style partitive operators in a manner that guarantees that the worlds quantified over match the actual world in the past; (ii) following Altshuler's observations regarding differences between events being 'completed' vs. events 'not continuing', the paper provides a comparison between examples from Spanish and Russian to argue that more than one notion of 'complete-event' is actually needed; (iii) expanding on Altshuler's proposal to link habitual readings to plural events, the paper examines the case of Spanish Perfecto vs. Imperfecto, showing that both modality and plurality play a crucial role in generating habitual readings. The paper also discusses the relative role of semantics and pragmatics in the interpretation of aspectual operators, comparing some aspects of Altshuler's proposal to Arregui et al. (). Together, the various examples strengthen the case for a semantics of aspect grounded on a fine-grained ontology that brings together both temporal and modal dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, inspired by María J. Arche's work, 'The construction of viewpoint aspect: the imperfective revisited' (, this issue), I add several pieces of evidence in favor of her proposal that viewpoint aspect does not alter the fundamental situation aspect properties of predicates. Namely, I discuss the temporal interpretations in Capeverdean, a Portuguese-based Creole language for which the salient opposition in the domain of viewpoint aspect is not between the imperfective and the perfective, but rather between the Progressive and the Perfect, here taken as semantically complex categories that involve certain temporal characteristics; crucially, imperfectivity is one of the features of the Progressive and a perfective viewpoint is part of the semantic complexity of the Perfect. I also discuss the role of for-time durational adverbials when combined with the perfective and propose that, in their presence, the relevant final boundary when telic predicates are at stake is not the culmination of the event, but rather the final point described by that time-argument. This proposal accounts nicely for the fact that, in these specific contexts, there is no contradiction in having this perfective clause conjoined with the assertion that the underlying telic situation is not completed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tense is traditionally assumed to express temporal relations between the time of the event and the moment of speech, whereas aspect expresses various views on one and the same event. In Klein (), it was argued that the intuitions which underlie this viewing metaphor can be made precise by a time-relational analysis as well. In his article 'Aspect vs. relative tense: the case reopened', Jürgen Bohnemeyer challenges one important point of this analysis, the equation of aspect and relative tense in the English perfect and in temporal forms of few other languages. In the present comment, it is argued that this is indeed a simplification, which does not speak, however, against a time-relational analysis of aspect in general. The main lines of such an analysis for the English perfect are sketched. It is shown that it naturally accounts for differences between the simple past and the present perfect, as well as for the oddity of constructions such as Einstein has visited Princeton or Ira has left yesterday at five. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a typology of partitive aspectual operators based on whether an operator: (i) requires (non-)proper event parts in the extension of the VP that it combines with and (ii) imposes a 'maximal stage requirement', which is satisfied when a VP-event culminates or ceases to develop further in the actual world. I provide evidence for such a typology by looking at the Russian imperfective, the Hindi perfective and the English progressive. I argue that each of these languages has a partitive, aspectual operator that fills a distinct cell in the proposed typology. The typology is important because it allows us to dispense with Smith's (The parameter of aspect. Kluwer, Dordrecht, ) notion of 'neutral aspect' used to classify aspectual forms as having properties of both the perfective and the imperfective. In particular, the typology reveals that an operator is perfective if it requires a maximal stage of an event in the extension of the VP that it combines with; an operator is imperfective if it requires a stage of an event in the extension of the VP that it combines with, but this stage need not be maximal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a constructionist approach to viewpoint Aspect by exploring the idea that it does not exert any altering force on the situation-aspect properties of predicates. The proposal is developed by analyzing the syntax and semantics of the imperfective, which has been attributed a coercer role in the literature as a de-telicizer and de-stativizer in the progressive, and as a de-eventivizer in the so-called ability (or attitudinal) and habitual readings. This paper proposes a unified semantics for the imperfective, preserving the properties of eventualities throughout the derivation. The paper argues that the semantics of viewpoint aspect is encoded in a series of functional heads containing interval-ordering predicates and quantifiers. This richer structure allows us to account for a greater amount of phenomena, such as the perfective nature of the individual instantiations of the event within a habitual construction or the nonculminating reading of perfective accomplishments in Spanish. This paper hypothesizes that nonculminating accomplishments have an underlying structure corresponding to the perfective progressive. As a consequence, the progressive becomes disentangled from imperfectivity and is given a novel analysis. The proposed syntax is argued to have a corresponding explicit morphology in languages such as Spanish and a nondifferentiating one in languages such as English; however, the syntax-semantics underlying both of these languages is argued to be the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction presents the matter that this Topic/Comment issue addresses-namely, the encoding of aspectual information in the syntax and morphology. The main aim of this issue is to shed light on the identification of the semantic primitives underlying the most prominent viewpoint aspectual forms referred to in the literature (e.g., Imperfect, Perfective, Perfect, and Neutral), and to give a principled explanation of the way in which these semantic primitives are represented in the syntax and mapped onto the morphology. The introduction surveys and compares the different proposals that the authors in the issue defend in this regard and discusses the need of finer grained analyses so that more accurate crosslinguistic correspondences, which are crucial for answering questions in realms such as that of second language acquisition, can be established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel analysis of aspectual verbs is proposed according to which aspectual verbs are heads of functional projections rather than main verbs taking clausal complements. As a case study, four Japanese aspectual verbs are analyzed: those that express inception ( hajime- 'begin'), continuation ( tsuzuke- 'continue'), and termination ( oe- 'finish', and owar- 'end'). Employing data from previous studies, Japanese aspectual verbs are shown to exhibit the following two characteristic behaviors: (i) they occasionally exhibit mono-clausal properties, and (ii) they impose different selectional restrictions on their verbal complements. These behaviors are characteristic of aspectual verbs cross-linguistically. This paper argues that these behaviors of Japanese aspectual verbs are accounted for if they are analyzed as heads of aspect phrases, the functional heads that encode aspectual information about events. In particular, it is proposed that (a) aspect heads occur in two positions in a clause, where they select for syntactic realizations of different event types, and (b) individual aspectual verbs are distributed differently between these two head positions based on the event types they select. The proposed analysis is shown to account for previously unaccounted for correlations between passivizability of the aspectual verbs and the event types of the verbal complements, as well as interactions between the Japanese aspectual verbs, subject honorification, and the focus particle -dake 'only'. Finally, cross-linguistic data from previous studies on aspectual verbs in German, Italian and other Romance languages, and Basque are discussed and shown to provide further support for the proposed analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation of Japanese temporal clauses depends on an intricate interplay between a number of factors including, in addition to the temporal connective, the tense and aspectual properties of the embedded clause as well as the matrix clause. This paper presents a detailed survey of these interactions and a model-theoretic compositional analysis which improves significantly over previous proposals in terms of attention to empirical detail and internal simplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on certain modals: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement of the modal to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. I show that this puzzling behavior, originally discussed in Bhatt (1999, Covert modality in non-finite contexts) for the ability modal, extends to all modal auxiliaries with a circumstantial modal base (i.e., root modals), while epistemic interpretations of the same modals are immune to the effect. I propose that implicative readings are contingent on the relative position of the modal w.r.t. aspect: when aspect scopes over the modal (as I argue is the case for root modals), it forces an actual event, thereby yielding an implicative reading. When a modal element scopes over aspect, no actual event is forced. This happens (i) with epistemics, which structurally appear above tense and aspect; (ii) with imperfective on a root modal: imperfective brings in an additional layer of modality, itself responsible for removing the necessity for an actual event. This proposal enables us to solve the puzzle while maintaining a standardized semantics for aspects and modals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Bulgarian and Slovenian constructions with a dispositional reading and no apparent dispositional marker, such as Bulgarian Na Ivan mu se raboteše. Such a sentence combines a dative logical subject Ivan with an inflected verb raboteše ‘work’, and roughly corresponds to ‘Ivan was in a working mood’, so does not entail that Ivan worked. I argue that such constructions consist of two core ingredients that account both for their syntactic properties, and for their modal flavor as dispositions. One ingredient is an Imperfective Operator in Viewpoint Aspect as the source of modality. Such an Operator resembles in syntactic and semantic properties both the Progressive Operator in so-called English Futurates such as For two weeks, the Red Sox were playing the Yankees today, and the Spanish modal Imperfecto. The other ingredient is a High Applicative Phrase with an oblique subject, which, other than determining syntactic properties, contributes to a difference in modal flavor with English Futurates. English Futurates denote plans, and a hypothesis is that this is due to their nominative subjects being paired to a presupposition giving them control over the intended event. By contrast, the Slavic constructions in this paper denote dispositions, not plans, because their oblique subjects cannot be paired with a similar presupposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the Korean suffix -te, which has been variously analyzed as a marker of tense, aspect, tense-aspect, mood, mood-tense, or evidentiality. I argue against all of these approaches and propose instead that -te is a spatial deictic past tense, which triggers an evidential environment. It refers to a certain past time when the speaker either observed an event or some evidence of the event within his (her) perceptual field. Thus, the denotation of-te is 'overlap', not between the speaker's perceptual field and the event itself, but between the speaker's perceptual field and the evidence of the event at the past reference time. To account for this denotation, I propose an 'evidence trace' function as well as a 'speaker's perceptual trace' function (cf. M. Failer, J Semantics 21:45-85, 2004). My analysis shows that suffixes like -ess (which is traditionally analyzed as a perfect) play two roles, as an indirect evidential and a perfect, depending on whether they appear with the spatial deictic tense -te or with a simple deictic tense. I argue that in Korean two distinct tense systems--the regular tense-aspect system and the spatial deictic tense-evidential system--exist in parallel. Thus the proposed analysis allows evidentials to be subsumed under the formal theory of tense, aspect, and mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences in the interpretation of would-conditionals with simple (perfective) and perfect antecedent clauses are marked enough to discourage a unified view. However, this paper presents a unified, Lewis-Stalnaker style semantics for the modal in such constructions. Differences in the interpretation of the conditionals are derived from the interaction between the interpretation of different types of aspect and the modal. The paper makes a distinction between perfective and perfect aspect in terms of whether they make reference to or quantify over Lewis-style events. In making reference to Lewis-events, perfective aspect is shown to be incompatible with counterfactual would-conditionals. The so-called 'epistemic flavor' of perfective conditionals about the future is derived from the use of diagonalization as an interpretive strategy called upon to resolve reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous temporal relations of verbal actions have been analysed in terms of various grammatical means of expressing verbal temporalisation such as tense, aspect, duration and iteration. Here the temporal relations within verb semantics, particularly ordered pairs of verb entailment, are studied using Allen's interval-based temporal formalism. Their application to the compositional visual definitions in our intelligent storytelling system, CONFUCIUS, is presented, including the representation of procedural events, achievement events and lexical causatives. In applying these methods we consider both language modalities and visual modalities since CONFUCIUS is a multimodal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Validity of dynamic temporal reasoning is semantically characterized for English and Dutch aspectual adverbs in Discourse Representation Theory. This dynamic perspective determines how the content needs to be revised and what information is preserved across updates, when the order of premises is considered relevant. Resetting contextual parameters relies on modelling the basic aspectual polarity transitions and temporal reasoning extensionally. For intensional aspectual adverbials the speaker's attitudes regarding past alternatives to and possible continuations of the current state come into play. Additional considerations are offered for generalizing this system to the full logical space for linguistic universals, lexicalized quite differently in Dutch and English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]