| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Under the banner of "Contrastive (Formal) Semantics", this project has investigated into the composition of sentential semantics and its ramifications in a contrasitive and comparative way. Specifically, we have developed an approach of "Situation Structures" on tense and aspect in all the three areas of lexical semantics, sentential semantics and discourse semantics.
At the level of the lexicon theory, relations of aspect and argument structrues have been studied on the compositional structure of lexical meanings of verbs.First, verbal aspect is formally characterized based on degres in the form of "Situation Structures".The unique path and the dynamism contained in verbal meanings are given rise to by the minotonicity information of degrees with times.An advantage of this approach resides in the unified accounts of temporal interpretation and resultative aspect of past particiles, second predicates of resultative constructons and prdpositional phrases for mvenent verbs.In addition, wa
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ys of quantification in terms of adverbs and intensifiers are made clear as by-products, In the ordinary course of things, these quantificational words are secondly used for a further resarch on micro-structures of verbal aspect.Inthis micro-analysis, the degree scale for the monotonicity ("the unique path")is cognitively decomposed into an object dimension and an abstract change of state, The latter distinction is connected to the distintion of integrative and distribtive predications on the one hand, and is used for the eplanation of the whole complex of the so-calle "quasi-resultative constructions".Finally, not lnly past participles, but the whole perfect construction can be compositionally analysed in a consequent fashion Specifically, common features of BE and HAVE are worked out especially for a language like German, which have both BE and HAVE as perfect auxiliaries. In general, lexical properties of verbs are explicated in light of underspecification of aspectual information at the sentential level.
At the level of sentential semantics, we have mainly argued for the underspecification of aspectual information: Basically, there are different choices at the sentential level. As a consequence, there must be a discourse semantic procedure for the resolution of the sentential aspect. It is therefore contrastive semantically interesting to see how the meaning of nominal phrases contributes to the sentential aspect. Even the interpretation of floating quantifiers changes depending on their internal structure and their information-structural position. This has much to do with the so-called "semantic incorporation" of weak quantifiers. Finally, we have also analysed tense in complex sentences in Japanese in the framework of HPSG. In view of the sloppy boundary of tense and aspect, a unified explanation has been delivered exploiting the relative tense. Less
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