The Syntax Of Aspect: Deriving Thematic and Aspectual Interpretation (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)

This collection of new work focuses on issues at the lexicon-syntax interface. It presents innovative analyses of theoretical issues of aspectual interpretation in a variety of languages. The authors address questions such as to what extent can variation in verbal meaning, and thematic information can be determined in the syntax, and how the interpretation of various syntactic constructions is derived, once lexical information is minimized. A subset of the articles develops theories that take as their starting point the lexical-syntactic framework of the late Ken Hale and Jay Keyser, prominent among which is their own chapter.

Nomi Erteschik-Shir is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Her publications include The Dynamics of Focus Structure (1997). She is writing The Syntax-Discourse Interface: Information Structure (forthcoming in Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology). Tova Rapoport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. She is currently working on a theory of syntax-driven interpretation, including a book with Nomi Erteschik-Shir on the lexicon-syntax interface, The Atoms of Meaning.