BEATRIZ MARTÍNEZ FERNÁNDEZ

Universidad de La Rioja

A functional view of the aspect of the nominal phrase in English

Morfología

This paper studies the notion of aspect within the nominal phrase in English. Dik (1997) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) define nominal aspect in terms of the mass/count distinction and other notions such as ensemble, mass, set, proper, count and collective nouns. Count nouns are those that refer to things, people or places that can be counted, whereas mass nouns refer to substances, things, or abstract entities that cannot be counted. However, some of these mass nouns can be made countable when inserted in count structures of the type a carton of milk, a tea bag, one kilo of meat, etc. And, in turn, some count nouns may be used to refer to a mass, as shown in We had chicken for dinner. For this reason, here I distinguish between noun aspect – an intrinsic, paradigmatic property of the noun - and nominal phrase aspect – an extrinsic, syntagmatic property of the noun. Noun aspect is dealt with in terms of count/mass, whereas nominal phrase aspect is defined in terms of telicity. Such terminology appears adequate, given the parallelism existing between the perfective/imperfective aspect of verbs and the count/mass distinction in nouns (Jackendoff 1990).
In order to study the aspect of the nominal phrase, I make use of Givón´s (1993) list of pre-nominal modifiers, in their singular and plural versions, in combination with count and mass nouns. This way, the most basic realizations are accounted for.
The results of this study are offered at core and phrase level, according to Van Valin and LaPolla´s (1997) idea that nominal phrase operators realized by, among others, determiners and noun classifiers, parallel the scope principle of operators in the clause. The examples displayed are by no means exhaustive, but I hope they will suffice to illustrate the way aspect varies within the nominal phrase.

Dik, S. C. (1997). The Theory of Functional Grammar, Vol.1: The Structure of the Clause. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Givón, T. (1993). English Grammar. A Function-Based Introduction (I). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Jackendoff, R.S. (1990). Semantic structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Van Valin, Robert D. Jr. & LaPolla,R.J. (1997). Syntax. Structure, meaning and function. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

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