On ‘Knowledge of The World’ in the Explication of Aspect in English

Abstract

In previous chapters of this book many cases were dealt with in which the compositional mechanism for explicating aspectual distinctions did not seem to work or did not work. A sentence like (241b), for example, constructed by Tenny (1994: 28), was shown to explicate imperfectivity. Tenny argued that the verb surround in this sentence is stative and that the boundedness of the entire expression will be unaffected whether the verb is accompanied by a bare mass noun subject, as in (241b), or by a mass noun subject with an article, as in (303a). As already discussed earlier, an argumentation of this kind appears to undermine the compositional mechanism. The failure on Tenny’s part to notice that in a slightly different sentence like (242b) the compositional mechanism does work does not, however, remove the problem stemming from the fact that in a sentence with a bare singular noun subject like (303b), again, there is something that prevents the compositional mechanism to work, at least in so far as the sentence is perfective, fully grammatical and acceptable with the adverbial in two hours.