Aspect and Discourse Structure: 
Is a Neutral Viewpoint Required?* 
Frank Schilder 
Centre for Cognitive Science 
2 Buccleuch Place 
Edinburgh EH8 9LW, Scotland, U.K. 
Internet: schilder@cogsc±, ed. ac.uk 
Abstract 
We apply Smith's theory of aspect (1991) 
to German - a language without any as- 
pectual markers. In particular, we try 
to shed more light on the effects aspect 
can have on discourse structure and 
show how English and German behave dif- 
ferently in this respect. We furthermore 
describe how Smith's notion of a neutral 
viewpoint can be helpful for the anal- 
ysis of discourse in German. It turned 
out that proposals claiming that the Ger- 
man Preterite covers the progressive as 
well as the simple aspect can not suffi- 
ciently explain the data presented in this 
paper (B~iuerle, 1988). Finally we give 
a sltuatlon-theoretic approach to for- 
malize Smith's intuitions following Glas- 
bey (1994) incorporating Allen's interval- 
calculus (Allen, 1984). 
1 Viewpoint and Situation Aspect 
Smith (1991) presents two terms which are assigned 
to two distinct phenomena in language: viewpoint 
and situation aspect. This two-level theory gives 
an explanation for the difference between aspectual 
information understood as a view on a situation and 
temporal features of a situation. The former can be 
gained after applying a certain viewpoint chosen by 
the speaker and the latter one is stored in the lexical 
entry of a lexeme.l 
" The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful 
comments of Sheila Glasbey, Lex Holt and the three 
anonymous reviewers of this paper. This research was 
supported by a PhD-scholarship HSPII/AUFE awarded 
by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). 
1Besides the situation aspect described by the seman- 
tic entry of the verb many other sentential constituents 
(e.g. object or subject NPs) may have an influence on it (Krif~, 1992). 
Situation Aspects Smith introduces three so- 
called "conceptual features" of situation aspects 
which have binary values \[-4-\], namely stative, dura- 
tire and telic. Five different situation aspects have 
emerged which are distinguished using these features 
and certain temporal schemata? Examples: 
- Sam owned three peach orchards. (State) 
- Lily swam in the pond. (Activity) 
- Mrs Ramsey wrote a letter. (Accomplishment) 
- Lily knocked at the door. (Semelfactive) 
- Mr Ramsey reached the lighthouse. (Achievement) 
Viewpoints Smith postulates three different 
viewpoints. Schematically she uses an idealised time 
line where the initial and finishing points of a situ- 
ation are indicated by I and F respectively. The 
duration of the situation can be drawn in two differ- 
ent ways: as an unstructured (--) and a structured 
(...) phase which has internal stages. The view- 
point is understood in this representation as a focus 
on parts or on the whole situation (///) (figure 1). 
a) i..IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII..F 
b) I F 
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII 
c) I. /// 
Figure 1: The a) imperfective b) perfective and c) 
neutral viewpoint 
Two viewpoints correspond mainly to the well- 
known opposition perfective/imperfective. However, 
additionally Smith assumes a so-called neutral view- 
point which contains the initial point and at least 
one internal stage. 
Aspectually vague sentences which provide either 
an open or a closed reading back up Smith's consid- 
ZSee Smith (1991) for a detailed discussion. 
326 
erations (Smith, 1991:120). 3 
However, she restricts her analysis to single sen- 
tences and neglects the effects viewpoints can have 
in a discourse. We will therefore focus on this issue 
in the next section. 
2 Discourse Structure 
We investigate here which viewpoint is appropriate 
for the German Preterite. B~uerle (1988:131), for 
instance, claims that this tense in German is am- 
biguous w.r.t, the perfective/imperfective view on a 
situation and gives the following evidence for it: 
(1) a. Der Angeklagte fuhr nach Hause. Dort 
trank er ein Glas Trollinger. 
The defendant drove home. There he 
drank a glass of Trollinger. 
b. Der Angeklagte fuhr nach Hause. Am 
Lustnauer Tor hatte er einen schweren 
Unfall und musste ins Krankenhaus 
eingeliefert werden. 
The defendant was driving home. At the 
Lustnauer tower he had a serious accident 
and had to be admitted to the hospital. 
In (la) the VP fuhr nach Hause refers to a com- 
pleted event and therefore contains an end point. In 
(lb) this end point is denied by the second sentence. 
Note that the English translation of (lb) is therefore 
only correct if an imperfective view is used. 
This data shows that the use of the Preterite in 
German does not commit the speaker to saying any- 
thing about the end point. Every inference regarding 
the ending of a situation is due to the context or our 
world knowledge. 
It may be concluded from (1) that we cannot as- 
sume a perfective viewpoint, because this view in- 
cludes the end point of a situation. The follow- 
ing discourse will furthermore show that also the 
imperfective view is not applicable to the German 
Preterite. 
It is commonly supposed that the imperfective 
viewpoint which refers to the middle of a situation 
omitting the initial as well as the final point can be 
used for describing a background within a discourse 
(cf. Smith, 1991:130): 
(2) The defendant had an accident. He was 
driving home (at this time). 
3FoUowing Smith (1991) we applied two tests to Ger- 
man data regarding the temporal properties of the end 
point of a situation which are discussed in Schilder (1995). 
A direct German translation, however, expresses two 
subsequent events. At first the defendant had an 
accident and then he drove home: 
(3) Der Angeklagte hatte einen Unfall. Er fuhr 
nach Hause (??zu der Zeit). 
Adding the PP zu der Zeit ('at this time') the 
sentence functions as a background for the event 
described by the first sentence, but this discourse 
sounds awkward and the continuation with a state 
in (4) is clearly preferred. 4 
(4) Er war auf dem Weg nach Hause. 
Discourse (3) shows that for the German Preterite 
the initial point is focussed by the viewpoint. This 
observation proves therefore that this tense is not 
ambiguous w.r.t the progressive and the simple as- 
pect as B~uerle (1988) claims. 
To sum up, these two discourses can be seen 
to show that the German aspect system for the 
Preterite offers only a neutral view on every situ- 
ation. 
Moreover, this data disproves B/~uerle's explana- 
tion of (1), clarifies Smith's definition of a viewpoint 
and motivates the need for a neutral viewpoint in 
German. 
It is obviously a shortcoming of Smith's descrip- 
tion to define the viewpoint merely as a focus on 
parts or on the whole situation. It emerged from 
the discourse examples that a crucial function of the 
viewpoint is the commitment the speaker gives as 
to whether the end point has been reached or not. 
In English, the perfective view sets the end point 5 
and no cancellation is allowed afterwards. A neu- 
tral view on a situation gives only a confirmation of 
the initial point. It leaves open whether the end has 
been reached or not. Only the temporal knowledge 
derived from the situation aspect can provide further 
information which, however, may be overridden by 
the context. 
3 A Situation-theoretic 
Formalisation 
We follow Glasbey (1994:15) in her criticism of 
Smith's formalisation within Discourse Represen- 
tation Theory (DRT) (Kamp & Reyle, 1993).6 
4Note that the PP at this time is not required for the 
English discourse to be fully understood. 
5Provided that the situation aspect provides an in- 
herent end point which is not the case for states. 
6A new account presented by Asher (1993) to de- 
scribe types of eventualities is currently being investi- 
gated. Note that the standard definition of DRT does 
not provide any description of types or other abstract 
entities. 
327 
Unlike DRT, STDRT (Cooper, 1992) has the no- 
tion of an event type which can be used for the in- 
formation given by the situation aspect. Note that 
this event type does not have to be instantiated with 
a situation of this type; it will therefore not be in- 
troduced like a discourse referent in a discourse 
representation structure. 7 
s_LJ 
fahren(X,Y,T) 
al 
narned(X,'Der Angeklagte') named(Y,'nach Hause') 
sl 
ACCOMPLISHMENT 
Figure 2: The complete event type ¢ 
The first sentence of (1) refers to a situation s,, 
where sn is of a type ¢. Type ¢ can be seen as 
the part of an episode of the complete event type 
¢ which is focussed by the neutral viewpoint. We 
have therefore to define the initial point and the first 
stage. 
<3i,itial ~ iff: 
Ve, e'\[\[e : ^ e' : e <3 e'A \[Ve"\[e" e' 
_ e"\] t {BEFORE, MEETS} t"\]\] 
O~ <3first_stage ~ iff: 
Ve, e',e"\[\[e : a A e' : j3 A e" : 7 A 7 <3initial fl\] "+ 
e <3 e' A t" {MEETS} t\] 
t, t ~, t" are the occurrence times of e, e ~ and e H re- 
spectively, <3 is the PART-OF relation between sit- 
uations and BEFORE and MEETS are Allen's interval- 
relations as defined in Allen (1984). 
4 Conclusion 
We showed that Smith's notion of a neutral view- 
point is crucial for German. In particular, we in- 
vestigated the effects this viewpoint has on a dis- 
course level and compared it with English. It may 
be concluded from this analysis that discourse struc- 
ture differs depending on the language. A discourse 
grammar developed for English cannot easily be ap- 
plied to German. This cross-linguistic account gives 
prominence to the underlying concepts instead of fo- 
cussing only on the surface structure which is unal- 
terably bound to the peculiarity of a single object 
language. 
7Figure 2 shows a simplified representation of the ac- 
complishment event type. No account will be given of the 
treatment of PPs like nach Hause for the time being. 
In our analysis for German, we therefore high- 
lighted the following two properties which can be 
stipulated regarding the neutral viewpoint: 
* The end point of a situation is beyond the focus 
of this viewpoint. Default information given by 
the situation aspect may be overridden by the 
context. 8 
• The neutral viewpoint contains the initial point 
of the situation. Backgrounding - a typical 
function of the imperfective view where the ini- 
tim point is not included - is therefore not ap- 
plicable for this viewpoint. 
Furthermore, the proposed formalisation provides 
an account which can handle the discussed phenom- 
ena within an implementation; this is ongoing work. 

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