# Representing Aspectual Meaning in Sentence: Computational Modeling Based on Chinese
## 1 Introduction
### Lexical Aspect  
It should be noted that in this paper, the lexical aspect, as a term, is used to refer to the situation type at the lexical level. However, the lexical aspect is far from being studied comprehensively and reliably for several reasons. While aspects at the phrase and sentence level gain researchers' attention, lexical aspects are bypassed in many studies due to their rejection of the compositionality and recursiveness of aspectual information in sentences. This rejection mainly arises from the so-called ambiguity of verbs' situation types. Taking run and run a mile as examples, [PERSON] [4] treats run itself as an activity verb and run a mile as a transition, or accomplishment situation to be specific. Studies such as [PERSON] [6] identify this phenomenon as an ambiguity of verbs situation types since the situation type of run per se is different from the run in run a mile. To tackle this dilemma, she moves situation types onto the phrase level and claims that verbs have no situation type, which is followed by dozens of researchers. However, two issues occurred when this procedure was taken. On the one hand, enhancing the assignment of the situation types onto the phrasal level cannot solve the ambiguity problem because when new components such as arguments and adjuncts are added, the situation type will keep changing accordingly, meaning that we have to keep raising situation types onto upper levels until sentences which are the biggest grammatical units. On the other hand, there is no way to explore the interaction between the aspectual nature of verbs and aspectual markers because verbs are ruled out from situation type assignment. However, it is impossible to study aspect without talking about the interaction between verbs and aspectual makers, which serve as the foundation for situation types in upper levels. As a result, scholars who reject lexical aspects have to accumulate all of the aspectual information of the whole structure into the constituting verb, which makes a shifting nature for the verbs' situation type. What is more, they have to create other terminologies to refer to the situation type at the lexical level because they have already claimed that verbs have no situation type. Aspectual value and parameter are used in [PERSON] (2007) and [PERSON] (2008), respectively, which makes their rejection of situation type at the lexical level a self-contradictory statement because there is no fundamental difference between aspectual values/parameters and situation types. The ambiguity actually appears due to their rejection of the compositional and recursive nature of aspectual information. The situation type is recursive because different linguistic levels, such as verb, verb phrase and sentence, can have their own situation types. The situation type is compositional because different constituents in a structure form the situation type of the whole structure. It should be noted that the situation type of the constituting verb is independent of that of the whole structure. It is weird to insist that the run in run to the store is different from the run per se. The so-called shifting of run from an activity to an accomplishment is, in fact, imposing the meaning of to the store on run, which violates language reality. Accepting the recursive and compositional nature can help to settle this problem, which also means lexical aspects have to be studied before situation types at other levels because they are the basic units for phrases and sentences and, thus, for situation types at these levels. A lot of computational studies such as [PERSON] et al. [PERSON] et al. (2015), [PERSON] et al. [PERSON] et al. (2016), [PERSON] and [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2017), [PERSON] et al. (2018) only focus on the prediction of situation types in sentential level following linguistics studies who have reject the existence of lexical aspects, which makes the prediction of lexical aspects a nearly blank area to be explored.