Situation Aspect as a Universal Aspect*: Implications for Artificial Languages

Xiao, Zhonghua; McEnery, Anthony

doi:10.22425/jul.2002.3.2.139

J. Univers. Lang. 2002; 3(2):139-177

pISSN: 1598-6381

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22425/jul.2002.3.2.139

Article

Situation Aspect as a Universal Aspect*: Implications for Artificial Languages

Zhonghua Xiao¹, Anthony McEnery¹

Author Information & Copyright ▼

¹The University of Lancaster

Copyright ⓒ 2016, Sejong University Language Research Institue. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jan 01, 2017

Abstract

Aspect， as one of the elements of verb mechanics， has been over- looked by many language designers. This paper argues that an artificial language， designed as a universal language for international communication， should incorporate the “universal" component of aspect found cross-linguistically in natural languages. In doing so， the paper develops a two-level model of situation aspect in which situation aspect is modelled as verb classes at the lexical level and as situation types at the sentential level. With a framework consisting of a lexicon， a layered clause structure and a set of mapping rules， the model is developed and tested using an English corpus and a Chinese corpus.

Keywords: artificial language; situation aspect; universality

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