Aspect refers to the ways in which the internal shape of an event affects both acceptability and interpretation of the linguistic devices used to describe it. Aspectual inferences seem to depend not only on inherent verb semantics but also on the semantic contributions of their arguments. Aspect has a pervasive effect on interpretation or construal; semantic phenomena that interact with aspect in the interpretation of even the simplest sentence include:
- the presence of trajectors, landmarks, paths and goals
- the persistence and reversibility of states
- the use of effort and intention
- the force dynamics and/or homogeneity of actions
- the time scale of reasoning
- nominal features as animacy, boundedness (mass/count) and quantification
We have developed a dynamic model of aspectual composition, in which:
- Events are modeled using an active computational representation called x-schemas, an extension of the Petri net formalism that can encode goals, resources and many other features.
- General aspectual controller schemas are bound to specific action schemas to simulate an event in a context-sensitive manner.
- Linguistic markers affecting aspect (such as those constraining tense, temporal modifiers, nominals and pragmatic context) can elaborate and constrain event simulations.
