Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems

This thesis is devoted to the development of a unified formal treatment of aspectuality. The proposed treatment is based on the conception of aspectuality as a generic catagory, interpreted as the way in which the entities (objects or eventualities) belonging to the denotion of predicate occupy an area within the universe in which the predicate is defined, as defined by the contour of the area, but irrespective of the nature (spatial or temporal) and the mereological and topological organisation of the domain. such a conception is supported by the intuitive semantic analogy between the aspectual properties of the nomimal expressions, which imclude the stativity and telicity of the former and the countability, quantification, specificity and definateness of the latter. The analogy is also reflected in the formation of the temporal constitution of the eventuality expressed in the clause as a result of the interaction between the aspectual properties of the nominal constituents of the clause and the lexical semantics and the morphosyntactic properties of the verb.