Discourse Integration and the Acquisition of Aspect in Polish

Abstract

"Establishing the temporal reference of events and ituations depends not only on the semantics of tense and aspect morphology, but also on discourse effects as defined by interface rules between semantics and discourse. Such aspectual semantic-discourse rules either posit simultaneity of two events or situations as described by 2 sentences, or they create a sequence of events. Perfective aspect typically yields a sequence of two events, whereas imperfective aspect creates temporal overlap of two events. Acquiring aspect thus involves learning the semantics of perfective and imperfective aspect as well as integrating these representations in the semantics-discourse interface where temporal ordering of events and situations is established"