LINGUIST List 8.1011

Fri Jul 4 1997

Books: Semantics

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <annlinguistlist.org>

 * The PARAMETER OF ASPECT (second edition)
 by Carlota S. Smith, Department of Linguistics, University of
Texas 

The Parameter of Aspect presents a unified theory of aspect
within Universal Grammar. It provides an unusual combination of
syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches to a single domain, and
gives detailed linguistic analysis of five languages with very
different aspectual systems: English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Navajo
and Russian.
 
 Extensive discussion of the linguistic evidence is complemented
by a formal semantic treatment in the framework of Discourse
Representation Theory, with an explicit procedure for computing
aspectual meaning from syntactic surface structure.

 Among the theoretical innovations is a principled account of the
interaction between viewpoint (perfective, imperfective) and situation
type (state, event); a level of pragmatic analysis at which
contrastive and inferred meanings are stated; a default analysis of
sentences that are neither perfective nor imperfective in viewpoint.

 1997 349 pp. Hardbound ISBN 0-7923-4657-2 $175.00 

The following contributing LINGUIST publishers have made their backlists available on the World Wide Web:

• Blackwells
• Cascadilla Press
• Cornell University Linguistics Dept.
• CSLI Publications
• Garland Publishing
• Holland Academic Graphics
• John Benjamins
• Kluwer Academic Publishers
• MIT Working papers in Linguistics
• Mouton de Gruyter
• U. of Massachusetts Graduate Linguistics Association
• Pacific Linguistics Publications
• Routledge
• Summer Institute of Linguistics