| | |
Summary: Aspectual Composition and Sentence Interpretation:
A formal approach
Diego Moll´a-Aliod
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
to the
University of Edinburgh
1997
Abstract
This thesis is principally concerned with aspectual composition. Although there have
been some recent studies on this topic, none has succeeded in explaining all the dif-
ferent aspectual interactions existing between a verb and its arguments. This thesis
explores the interpretation of sentences containing transitive or intransitive verbs and
their arguments. It is found that sentence interpretation (in terms of distributive and
collective readings) together with a speaker's linguistic knowledge of the world plays
a decisive role in determining the aspectual interaction between a verb and its argu-
ments.
An important part in this thesis is the study of predicate properties. The paral-
lelism between the domain of objects and that of events is stressed by defining a set
of properties which may apply to predicates over both domains, namely quantisation
|
