María J. Arche, On Perfective but incomplete situations, SOAS, University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2014-12-01

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This seminar titled "On Perfective but incomplete situations" was given by María J. Arche (University of Greenwich) as part of the Linguistics Department Seminar Series at SOAS, University of London on 18 November 2014.

This talk deals with the semantics and morphosyntax of the perfective. The perfective has been traditionally defined as the viewpoint aspect that yields the interpretation that the situation is completed. However, descriptive study across languages is revealing that Perfective forms are compatible with incomplete situations, including the case of accomplishments. Such languages are, for example, Hindi (Singh 1998), Thai (Koenig & Muansuwan 2000), Salish (Bar-el et al 2005) or Russian (Altshuler 2014). In my talk I examine incomplete accomplishments in the perfective in Spanish by showing the restrictions that hold in this regard, and discuss a hypothesis about its morphosyntax. In particular, that, when the perfective yields incomplete accomplishments, the underlying morphosyntax is that of a perfective progressive.

You can find out more about this event at http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/events/deptseminars/18nov2014-on-perfective-but-incomplete-situations.html