Syntax and semantics of aspectual verbs
This isn't a project of my own, but rather a project I worked on with Thomas Grano while I was an undergraduate student at Indiana University.
Disclaimer: This description will be a bit brief and technical with regard to the linguistics. I didn’t work on this project for too long, as it was a small summer project that Tom gave me the opportunity to work on right before going to graduate school at the University of Chicago. I was responsible for collecting and processing data from a few languages: I think I focused on English, Spanish, Italian and Arabic. At the time, I was really interested in syntax and semantics (mostly because of how much fun Tom made it!), but as you can see from the rest of my site, my interests have moved away from these fields.
Overview
Thomas Grano and I worked on a project looking at the syntax-semantics interface of aspectual verbs — e.g. begin, finish, continue, etc. The interesting thing about these verbs is that they can occur in a range of syntactic/semantic contexts, which also makes the formal analysis of them tricky; for example, we have the following:
a) It began {raining / to rain}. RAISING
b) The war began. INTRANSITIVE
c) John carefully began {opening / to open} the door. CONTROL
d) John began the book. ‘COERCION’
e) The general began the war. TRANSITIVE AGENTIVE
f) ‘A’ begins the alphabet. TRANSITIVE NON-AGENTIVE
Brief notes on the analysis
The upshot of the analysis was that the external argument was ‘severed’ from the verb, which led to the external arguments being dealt with differently depending on the Aspect projection and whether the external argument was introduced by little v. Upon further reflection, this is a pretty logical move to make working within the dominant framework for syntax and semantics. One of the more interesting things we found is that there is a so-called ‘with-alternation’ when it comes to these aspectual verbs: only non-agentive sentences be paraphrased using a prepositional phrase headed by with. This observation inspired the analysis proposed.
Examples where the with-alternation is okay — non-agentive
a) The trail begins with a fountain.
b) The banquet began with a prayer.
c) The day ends with(/at) midnight.
d) The alphabet begins with ‘A’.
e) The row finished with a little porcelain pot.
Examples where the with-alternation is not okay / not as good — agentive
a) Reading the book began with John.
b) The book began with John.
c) The war began with the general.
More information
You can find the poster itself here. We presented this at the 2016 annual conference for the Linguistic Society of America.