On the stativity of the English Perfect

Katz, Graham

doi:10.1515/9783110902358.205

Cited by 55 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This corresponds to the aspectual class of the clause's main verb when ignoring any aspectual markers or transformations. For example, English sentences with perfect tense are usually considered to introduce states to the discourse (Smith, 1991;Katz, 2003), but we are interested in the aspectual class before this transformation takes place. The clause John has kissed Mary introduces a state, but the fundamental aspectual class of the 'tenseless' clause John kiss Mary is dynamic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic prediction of aspectual class of verbs in context

Friedrich¹,

Palmer²

2014

Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper describes a new approach to predicting the aspectual class of verbs in context, i.e., whether a verb is used in a stative or dynamic sense. We identify two challenging cases of this problem: when the verb is unseen in training data, and when the verb is ambiguous for aspectual class. A semi-supervised approach using linguistically-motivated features and a novel set of distributional features based on representative verb types allows us to predict classes accurately, even for unseen verbs. Many frequent verbs can be either stative or dynamic in different contexts, which has not been modeled by previous work; we use contextual features to resolve this ambiguity. In addition, we introduce two new datasets of clauses marked for aspectual class.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic prediction of aspectual class of verbs in context

Friedrich¹,

Palmer²

2014

Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, the fundamental lexical aspectual class of the verb make with the subject Mary and the object cake in (5) is dynamic. English clauses in past or present perfect such as (5) are static, as they focus on the post-state of an event rather than the event itself (Katz, 2003). Habituals with verbs of dynamic aspectual class are by far more frequent in our corpus, 2 but there are also instances of stative verbs used in a habitual way, as for example (6).…”

Section: Clausal and Lexical Aspectual Classmentioning

confidence: 91%

Automatic recognition of habituals: a three-way classification of clausal aspect

Friedrich¹,

Pinkal²

2015

Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper provides the first fully automatic approach for classifying clauses with respect to their aspectual properties as habitual, episodic or static. We bring together two strands of previous work, which address only the related tasks of the episodic-habitual and stative-dynamic distinctions, respectively. Our method combines different sources of information found to be useful for these tasks. We are the first to exhaustively classify all clauses of a text, achieving up to 80% accuracy (baseline 58%) for the three-way classification task, and up to 85% accuracy for related subtasks (baselines 50% and 60%), outperforming previous work. In addition, we provide a new large corpus of Wikipedia texts labeled according to our linguistically motivated guidelines.

show abstract

“…It is more plausible that the perfect functions to either introduce a so-called perfect time span (see e.g. Mittwoch 1988, Iatridou, Anagnastopulou & Izvorski 2001 or create a higher level resultant state or target state (see Parsons 1990, Katz 2003, though the exact characterization of the perfect tense is of no importance for this article. What is important is rather that we see the same difference between English and Swedish in the perfect tense as we see in the past tense.…”

Section: The Universal Perfectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When a modal verb takes an infinitival perfect complement, as in John must have murdered Bill, an epistemic reading is always possible (actually, in Swedish, it is the only reading available). I will assume following Parsons (1990) and Katz (2003) that perfects are on some relevant level treated as derived states, though this point is of no importance for this paper. 35.…”

Section: It Is Still An Open Question If Accomplishments and Achievemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Localizing cross-linguistic variation in Tense systems: On telicity and stativity in Swedish and English

Lundquist¹

2012

Nord J Linguist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is well known that the aktionsart/lexical aspect of a predicate influences the temporal interpretation and the aspectual marking of a sentence, and also that languages differ with respect to which aktionsart properties feed into the tense-aspect system (see e.g. Bohnemeyer & Swift 2004). In this paper, I try to pin down the exact locus of variation between languages where the stative–dynamic distinction is mainly grammaticized (e.g. English, Saamáka) and languages where the telic–atelic distinction is mainly grammaticized (e.g. Swedish, Chinese and Russian). The focus will be on the differences between English and Swedish, and I will argue that these two languages crucially differ in the nature of Assertion Time (or Topic/Reference Time, Klein 1994, Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2000): whereas the assertion time in English is always punctual in imperfective contexts, assertion time in Swedish can extend to include minimal stages of events. The Assertion Time is introduced by a (viewpoint) aspect head that is present in both languages, but not phonologically realized. The difference can thus not be ascribed to the presence or absence of overt tense, aspect or verb morphology, or to a special tense value, as argued in one way or other by, for example, Giorgi & Pianesi (1997), Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2000) and Ramchand (2012). Once this factor (i.e. the nature of Assertion Time) has been isolated, it becomes evident that all verbs in English and Swedish, regardless of telicity or dynamicity, can be assigned either a perfective or an imperfective value. Moreover, I will argue that the English progressive–non-progressive (or ‘simple’) distinction is independent of viewpoint aspect (i.e. the perfective– imperfective distinction) made in, for example, the Romance languages.

show abstract

On the stativity of the English Perfect

Cited by 55 publications

References 15 publications

Automatic prediction of aspectual class of verbs in context

Automatic prediction of aspectual class of verbs in context

Automatic recognition of habituals: a three-way classification of clausal aspect

Localizing cross-linguistic variation in Tense systems: On telicity and stativity in Swedish and English

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About