Aspect Shift in the Model of English Eventual Prominent Projection

Lizhong TAN

Abstract


Aspect shift is an important reason for flexibility of syntactic structure. Present researches mainly focus on the relationship between syntactic structures and aspectual shift. From the perspective of cognitive prominence, aspect shift results from inconsistency of headed subevent between lexical and syntactic aspect for the change of aspectual prominence. Aspectual prominence is not only under the constraint of lexical conceptual structure, but it is also affected by syntactic and pragmatic context. By analyzing the aspect shift of progressive, it is found that the lexical aspectual structure of different verbs leads to prominent effect, which in turn affects aspect shift, so the syntactic or pragmatic context which aspect shift needs to have is closely related to the lexical aspectual structure.


Keywords


Event; Prominence; Aspect shift; Lexical aspect

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/13644

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