At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Laurestine Bradford will present ” Quantitative Analyses of Aspectual Phenomena”
We will be meeting this Wednesday, October 2, at noon. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/82524506850.
Abstract: The study of verbal aspect concerns the shapes of events in time (aspectual class) and the temporal perspective taken in particular descriptions (aspectual choice). To fully describe aspect in a language requires detailed semantic elicitation and theory. However, because aspect also has strong overt effects on verbs’ distribution and morphology, we might be able to get a leg up by analyzing textual data. In this talk, I will give an overview of several approaches researchers have taken to studying verbal aspect quantitatively. These include aspectual class induction from distributional data, crowdsourced judgments, or cross-linguistic projection, as well as aspectual choice prediction from contextual, lexical, and grammatical features. I will comment on the potential for applying similar methods in the context of a Tlingit corpus with rich aspectual morphology and discourse structure but with limited size and annotation.