A FORMAL TREATMENT OF ASPECTUAL VIEWPOINT

It is generally considered at least since Moens & Steedman (1988) that
eventualities should be decomposed into sub-eventualities or stages (cf.
also Parsons 1990, Smith 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993). Formal models of
situation structure seldom pay attention to the actual ontological status
of stages. They either assume that situations  should be reified
(following Davidson 1967) or should be represented as propositions
associated with some interval semantics (cf. e.g. Partee 1973, Verkuyl
1993). De Swart (1998) is a notable exception to this. But I will show in
this talk that the type of treatment she advocates (namely one based on
the idea that the aspectual contribution of tenses only involve aspectual
type shifts, and no such a thing as an aspectual viewpoint, as proposed in
e.g. Smith 1991) cannot account for phenomena resorting to what I call
stage salience -- intuitively, the varying ability of stages to be made
'visible' in particular syntactic and semantic contexts.