Finishing this book was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. It took far too long from original idea to page proofs and suffered from being relegated to small corners of my life. It was very rarely on the front burner. Since I started working on this topic in 1991, there has been a lot of interesting work done on the areas of the articulation of VP, phrase structure mirroring event structure, the use of functional categories to represent Aktionsart, and many other areas that the research presented here touches on. The hardest thing about doing a project of this size is to accept that not everyone’s ideas can be addressed and not all new research can be incorporated. The only way that I have found it possible to let this book go to press is to reread the Preface to Events in the Semantics of English by Terence Parsons where he writes, ‘‘The goal of this book is neither completeness nor complete accuracy; it is to get some interesting proposals into the public arena for others to criticize, develop, and build on. ’’ My aim in this book is to make connections between various accounts of various constructions in various languages at the risk of treating each of these too lightly. I am grateful to too many people to thank them individually.

This book explores the syntactic nature of inner aspect from a minimalist perspective. It begins with the new observation that there are two independent properties at play in English inner aspect: the object-to-event mapping and event structure. From a discussion of English statives and Russian, it is concluded that the former property is variant and the latter universal; a minimalist conception of language variation arises naturally in this context. Additionally, an exploration of a lexical derivational approach to achievements leads to the expectation that there are no accomplishments in the lexicon. A detailed look at idioms suggests that this expectation is met. These results support the division of labor between an operative lexicon and narrow syntax in aspectual composition; this naturally poses a problem for (neo-)constructional approaches to inner aspect. Finally, one conclusion reached about the syntactic nature of inner aspect regards the object-to-event mapping: it is a purely syntactic phenomenon.

Based on an earlier edition published in 1992 in Bulgarian, this book offers a specific approach to one of the most controversial problems in linguistics. According to it, aspect is the result of a subtle and complex interplay between the referents of verbs and nouns in the sentence. This volume is of interest to researchers of aspect and related problems, theoretical and applied linguists, psycholinguists, philosophers of language, graduate students of general linguistics, English (Germanic), and Bulgarian (Slavic).

List of fellows in v. 1-5, 7-16, 20-30, 32-33, 35-41, 45; continued since 1908 in the Proceedings, v. 28-