SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Aspect across languages: the case of the Spanish Perfective but progressive

This talk will present an analysis of the progressive where more than one aspectual heads are proposed. These correspond to the auxiliary and the present participle of the lexical verb in analytical forms (e.g. -be walking). This will allow us to deal with cases rarely treated in the literature such as the perfective progressives, which are shown to have an explicit morphology in languages such as Spanish, different from imperfective progressives. Perfective progressives are argued to be semantically equivalent to the so-called neutral aspect cases in languages such as Hindi where the perfective of some telic verbs is considered to yield a non-culminating interpretation.