Deriving Verbal and Compositional Lexical Aspect 
for NLP Applications 
Bonnie J. Dorr and Marl Broman Olsen 
University of Maryland Institute for Ad.vanced Computer Studies 
A.V. Williams Building 
College Park, MD 20742, USA 
bonnie ,molsen©umiacs. umd. edu 
Abstract 
Verbal and compositional lexical aspect 
provide the underlying temporal struc- 
ture of events. Knowledge of lexical as- 
pect, e.g., (a)telicity, is therefore required 
for interpreting event sequences in dis- 
course (Dowty, 1986; Moens and Steed- 
man, 1988; Passoneau, 1988), interfacing 
to temporal databases (Androutsopoulos, 
1996), processing temporal modifiers (An- 
tonisse, 1994), describing allowable alter- 
nations and their semantic effects (Resnik, 
1996; Tenny, 1994), and selecting tense 
and lexical items for natural language gen- 
eration ((Dorr and Olsen, 1996; Klavans 
and Chodorow, 1992), cf. (Slobin and Bo- 
caz, 1988)). We show that it is possible 
to represent lexical aspect--both verbal 
and compositional--on a large scale, us- 
ing Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) 
representations of verbs in the classes cat- 
aloged by Levin (1993). We show how 
proper consideration of these universal 
pieces of verb meaning may be used to 
refine lexical representations and derive a 
range of meanings from combinations of 
LCS representations. A single algorithm 
may therefore be used to determine lexical 
aspect classes and features at both verbal 
and sentence levels. Finally, we illustrate 
how knowledge of lexical aspect facilitates 
the interpretation of events in NLP appli- 
cations. 
1 Introduction 
Knowledge of lexical aspect--how verbs denote situ- 
ations as developing or holding in time--is required 
for interpreting event sequences in discourse (Dowty, 
1986; Moens and Steedman, 1988; Passoneau, 1988), 
interfacing to temporal databases (Androutsopou- 
los, 1996), processing temporal modifiers (Antonisse, 
1994), describing allowable alternations and their se- 
mantic effects (Resnik, 1996; Tenny, 1994), and for 
selecting tense and lexical items for natural language 
generation ((Dorr and Olsen. 1996: Klavans and 
Chodorow, 1992), cf. (Slobin and Bocaz, 1988)). In 
addition, preliminary pyscholinguistic experiments 
(Antonisse, 1994) indicate that subjects are sensi- 
tive to the presence or absence of aspectual features 
when processing temporal modifiers. Resnik (1996) 
showed that the strength of distributionally derived 
selectional constraints helps predict whether verbs 
can participate in a class of diathesis alternations. 
with aspectual properties of verbs clearly influenc- 
ing the alternations of interest. He also points out 
that these properties are difficult to obtain directly 
from corpora. 
The ability to determine lexical aspect, on a large 
scale and in the sentential context, therefore yields 
an important source of constraints for corpus anal- 
ysis and psycholinguistic experimentation, as well 
as for NLP applications such as machine transla- 
tion (Dorr et al., 1995b) and foreign language tu- 
toring (Dorr et al., 1995a; Sams. 1995; Weinberg et 
al., 1995). Other researchers have proposed corpus- 
based approaches to acquiring lexical aspect infor- 
mation with varying data coverage: Klavans and 
Chodorow (1992) focus on the event-state distinc- 
tion in verbs and predicates; Light (1996) considers 
the aspectual properties of verbs and affixes; and 
McKeown and Siegel (1996) describe an algorithm 
for classifying sentences according to lexical aspect. 
properties. Conversely. a number of works in the 
linguistics literature have proposed lexical semantic 
templates for representing the aspectual properties 
of verbs (Dowry, 1979: Hovav and Levin, 1995; Levin 
and Rappaport Hovav. To appear), although these 
have not been implemented and tested on a large 
scale. 
We show that. it is possible to represent the lexical 
aspect both of verbs alone and in sentential contexts 
using Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) represen- 
tations of verbs in the classes cataloged by Levin 
(1993). We show how proper consideration of these 
universal pieces of verb meaning may be used t.o 
refine lexical representations and derive a range of 
meanings from combinations of LCS representations. 
151 
A single algorithm may therefore be used to deter- 
mine lexical aspect classes and features at both ver- 
bal and sentential levels. Finally, we illustrate how 
access to lexical aspect facilitates lexical selection 
and the interpretation of events in machine transla- 
tion and foreign language tutoring applications, re- 
spectively. 
2 Lexical Aspect 
Following Olsen (To appear in 1997), we distinguish 
between lexical and grammatical aspect, roughly 
the situation and viewpoint aspect of Smith (1991). 
Lexical aspect refers to the '0ype of situation denoted 
by the verb, alone or combined with other sentential 
constituents. Grammatical aspect takes these situa- 
tion types and presents them as impeffective (John 
was winning the race/loving his job) or perfective 
(John had won/loved his job). Verbs are assigned to 
lexical aspect classes, as in Table i (cf. (Brinton, 
1988)\[p. 57\], (Smith, 1991)) based on their behavior 
in a variety of syntactic and semantic frames that 
focus on their features. 1 
A major source of the difficulty in assigning lex- 
ical aspect features to verbs is the ability of verbs 
to appear in sentences denoting situations of multi- 
ple aspectual types. Such cases arise, e.g., in the 
context of foreign language tutoring (Dorr et al., 
1995b; Sams, 1995; Weinberg et al., 1995), where 
a a 'bounded' interpretation for an atelic verb, e.g., 
march, may be introduced by a path PP to the bridge 
or across the field or by a NP the length of the field: 
(1) The soldier marched to the bridge. 
The soldier marched across the field. 
The soldier marched the length of the field. 
Some have proposed, in fact, that aspec- 
tual classes are gradient categories (Klavans and 
Chodorow, 1992), or that aspect should be evaluated 
only at the clausal or sentential level (asp. (Verkuyl, 
1993); see (Klavans and Chodorow, 1992) for NLP 
applications). 
Olsen (To appear in 1997) showed that, although 
sentential and pragmatic context influence aspectual 
interpretation, input to the context is constrained in 
large part by verbs" aspectual information. In par- 
titular, she showed that the positively marked fea- 
tures did not vary: \[+telic\] verbs such as win were 
always bounded, for exainple, In contrast, the neg- 
atively marked features could be changed by other 
sentence constituents or pragmatic context: \[-telic\] 
verbs like march could therefore be made \[+telic\]. 
Similarly, stative verbs appeared with event inter- 
pretations, and punctiliar events as durative. Olsen 
1Two additional categories are identified by Olsen (To 
appear in 1997): Semelfactives (cough, tap) and Stage- 
level states (be pregnant). Since they are not assigned 
templates by either Dowty (1979) or Levin and Rappa- 
port Hovav (To appear), we do not discuss them in this 
paper. 
therefore proposed that aspectual interpretation be 
derived through monotonic composition of marked 
privative features \[+/1~ dynamic\], \[+/0 durative\] and 
\[+/0 relic\], as shown in Table 2 (Olsen, To appear 
in 1997, pp. 32-33). 
With privative features, other sentential con- 
stituents can add to features provided by the verb 
but not remove them. On this analysis, the activity 
features of march (\[+durative, +dynamic\]) propa- 
gate to the sentences in (1). with \[+telic\] added by 
the NP or PP, yielding an accomplishment interpre- 
tation. The feature specification of this composition- 
ally derived accomplishment is therefore identical to 
that of a sentence containing a relic accomplishment 
verb, such as produce in (2). 
(2) The commander produced the campaign plan. 
Dowry (1979) explored the possibility that as- 
pectual features in fact constrained possible units 
of meaning and ways in which they combine. In 
this spirit, Levin and Rappaport Hovav (To appear) 
demonstrate that limiting composition to aspectu- 
ally described structures is an important part of an 
account of how verbal meanings are built up, and 
what semantic and syntactic combinations are pos- 
sible. 
We draw upon these insights in revising our LCS 
lexicon in order to encode the aspectual features of 
verbs. In the next section we describe the LCS rep- 
resentation used in a database of 9000 verbs in 191 
major classes, We then describe the relationship of 
aspectual features to this representation and demon- 
strata that it is possible to determine aspectual fea- 
tures from LCS structures, with minimal modifica- 
tion. We demonstrate composition of the LCS and 
corresponding aspectual structures, by using exam- 
pies from NLP applications that employ the LCS 
database. 
3 Lexical Conceptual Structures 
We adopt the hypothesis explored in Dorr and Olsen 
(1996) (cf. (Tenny. t994)), that lexical aspect fea- 
tures are abstractions over other aspects of verb se- 
mantics, such as those reflected ill the verb classes in 
Levin (1993). Specifically we show that a privative 
model of aspect provides an appropriate diagnostic 
for revising \[exical representations: aspectual inter- 
pretations that arise only in the presence of other 
constituents may be removed from the lexicon and 
derived compositionally. Our modified LCS lexicon 
theu allows aspect features to be determined algo- 
rithmically both from the verbal lexicon and from 
composed structures built from verbs and other sen- 
tence constituents, using uniform processes and rep- 
resentations. 
This project on representing aspectual struc- 
ture builds on previous work, in which verbs were 
grouped automatically into Levin's semantic classes 
152 
Dynamic Durative Examples 
know. have 
Aspectual Class Telic 
State 
Activity 
Accomplishment ÷ 
Achievement + 
+ 
+ + march, paint 
+ + destroy 
+ notice, win 
Table 1: Featurai Identification of Aspectual Classes 
Aspectual Class Telic 
State 
Activity 
Accomplishment + 
Achievement + 
Dynamic Durative Examples 
+ know. have 
+ + march, paint 
+ + destroy 
+ notice, win 
Table 2: Privative Featural Identification of Aspectual Classes 
(Dorr and Jones, 1996; Dorr, To appear) and as- 
signed LCS templates from a database built as Lisp- 
like structures (Dorr, 1997). The assignment of as- 
pectual features to the classes in Levin was done by 
hand inspection of the semantic effect of the alter- 
nations described in Part I of Levin (Olsen, 1996), 
with automatic coindexing to the verb classes (see 
(Dorr and Olsen, 1996)). Although a number of 
Levin's verb classes were aspectually uniform, many 
required subdivisions by aspectual class; most of 
these divided atelic "manner" verbs from telic "re- 
sult" verbs, a fundamental linguistic distinction (cf. 
(Levin and Rappaport Hovav, To appear) and refer- 
ences therein). Examples are discussed below. 
Following Grimshaw (1993) Pinker (1989) and 
others, we distinguish between semantic struc- 
ture and semantic content. Semantic structure is 
built up from linguistically relevant and univer- 
sally accessible elements of verb meaning. Bor- 
rowing from Jackendoff (1990), we assume seman- 
tic structure to conform to wellformedness con- 
ditions based on Event and State types, further 
specialized into primitives such as GO, STAY, 
BE, GO-EXT, and ORIENT. We use Jackend- 
off's notion of field, which carries Loc(ational) se- 
mantic primitives into non-spatial domains such 
as Poss(essional), Temp(oral), Ident(ificational). 
Circ(umstantial), and Exist(ential). We adopt a 
new primitive, ACT, to characterize certain activi- 
ties (such as march) which are not adequately distin- 
guished from other event types by Jackendoff's GO 
primitive.-" Finally, we add a manner component, to 
distinguish among verbs in a class, such the motion 
verbs run, walk, and march. Consider march, one 
2Jackendoff (1990) augments the thematic tier of 
Jackendoff (1983) with an action tier, which serves to 
characterize activities using additional machinery. We 
choose to simplify this characterization by using the 
ACT primitive rather than introducing yet another level 
of representation. 
of Levin's Ran kerbs (51.3.2): 3 we assign it the tem- 
plate in (3)(i), with the corresponding Lisp format 
shown in (3)(ii): 
(3) (i) \[z .... ACTLoc 
(\[xhi,g * 1\],\[M ..... BY MARCH 26\])\] 
(ii) (act loc 
(* thing 1) (by march 26)) 
This list structure recursively associates argu- 
ments with their logical heads, represented as 
primitive/field combinations, e.g., ACTLoc becomes 
(act loc ...) with a (thing 1) argument. Seman- 
tic content is represented by a constant in a se- 
mantic structure position, indicating the linguisti- 
cally inert and non-universal aspects of verb mean- 
ing (cf. (Grimshaw, 1993; Pinker, 1989; Levin and 
Rappaport Hovav, To appear)), the manner com- 
ponent by march in this case. The numbers in the 
lexical entry are codes that map between LCS po- 
sitions and their corresponding thematic roles (e.g., 
1 = agent). The * marker indicates a variable po- 
sition (i.e., a non-constant) that is potentially filled 
through composition with other constituents. 
In (3), (thing 1) is the only argument. However. 
other arguments may be instantiated composition- 
ally by the end-NLP application, as in (4) below. 
for the sentence The soldier marched to the bridge: 
(4) (i) \[E .... CAUSE 
(\[Eve.t ACTLoc 
(\[Thing SOLDIER\], 
\[M ..... BY MARCH\])\], 
\[v~,h TOLo, 
(\[Vhi,g SOLDIER\], \[Position 
ATLoc (\[Thing SOLDIER\], 
\[Whi,,g BRIDGE\])\])\])\] 
(ii) (cause (act \]oc (soldier) (by march)) 
(to loc (soldier) 
(at loc (soldier) (bridge)))) 
3The numbers after the verb examples are verb class 
sections in Levin (1993). 
153 
In the next sections we outline the aspectual proper- 
ties of the LCS templates for verbs in the lexicon and 
illustrate how LCS templates compose at the senten- 
tim level, demonstrating how lexical aspect feature 
determination occurs via the same algorithm at both 
verbal and sentential levels, 
4 Determining Aspect Features from 
the LCS Structures 
The components of our LCS templates correlate 
strongly with aspectual category distinctions. An 
exhaustive listing of aspectual types and their cor- 
responding LCS representations is given below. The 
! ! notation is used as a wildcard which is filled in by 
the lexeme associated with the word defined in the 
lexical entry, thus producing a semantic constant. 
(5) (i) States: 
(be ident/perc/loc 
(thing 2) ... (by !! 26)) 
(ii) Activities: 
(act loc/perc (thing 1) (by !! 26)) 
or (act loc/perc (thing 1) 
(with instr ... (!!-er 20))) 
or (act loc/perc (thing 1) 
(on loc/perc (thing 2)) 
(by ~ 26)) 
or (act loc/perc (thing 1) 
(on loc/perc (thing 2)) 
(with instr ... (! !-er 20))) 
(iii) Accomplishments: 
(cause/let (thing 1) 
(go loc (thing 2) 
(toward/away_frora ... ) ) 
(by !! 26)) 
or (cause/let (thing 1) 
(go/be ident 
(thing 2) ... (!!-ed 9))) 
or (cause/let (thing 1) 
(go loc (thing 2) ... (!! 6))) 
or (cause/let (thing I) 
(go loc (thing 2) ... (!! 4))) 
or (cause/let (thing I) 
(go exist (thing 2) ... (exist 9)) 
(by !! 26)) 
(iv) Achievements: 
(go loc (thing 2) (toward/away_from ...) 
(by !! 26)) 
or (go loc (thing 2) ... (!! 6)) 
or (go loc (thing 2) .... (!! 4)) 
or (go exist (thing 2) ... (exist 9) 
(by ~ 26)) 
or (go ident (thing 2) ... (!!-ed 9)) 
The Lexical Semantic Templates (LSTs) of Levin 
and Rappaport-Hovav (To appear) and the decom- 
positions of Dowry (1979) also capture aspectual dis- 
tinctions, but are not articulated enough to capture 
other distinctions among verbs required by a large- 
scale application. 
Since the verb classes (state, activity, etc.) are ab- 
stractions over feature combinations, we now discuss 
each feature in turn. 
4.1 Dynamicity 
The feature \[+dynamic\] encodes the distinction be- 
tween events (\[+dynamic\]) and states (\[0dynamic\]). 
Arguably "the most salient distinction" in an aspect 
taxonomy (Dahh 1985, p. 28), in the LCS dynamic- 
ity is encoded at the topmost level. Events are char- 
acterized by go, act, stay, cause, or let, whereas 
States are characterized by go-ext or be, as illus- 
trated in (6). 
(6) (i) Achievements: decay, rust, redden (45.5) 
(go ident (* thing 2) 
(toward ident (thing 2) 
(at ident (thing 2) (!!-ed 9)))) 
(ii) Accomplishments: dangle, suspend (9.2} 
(cause (* thing 1) 
(be ident (* thing 2) 
(at ident (thing 2) (!!-ed 9)))) 
(iii) States: contain, enclose (47.8) 
(be loc (* thing 2) 
(in loc (thing 2) (* thing 11)) 
(by ~ 26)) 
(iv} Activities: amble, run. zigzag (51.3.2) 
(act loc (* thing 1) (by !! 26)) 
4.2 Durativity 
The \[+durative\] feature denotes situations that take 
time (states, activities and accomplishments). Situ- 
ations that may be punctiliar (achievements) are un- 
specified for durativity ((O\[sen, To appear in 1997) 
following (Smith, 1991), inter alia). In the LCS, du- 
rativity may be identified by the presence of act, 
be, go-ext, cause, and let primitives, as in (7): 
these are lacking in the achievement template, shown 
in (8). 
(7) (i) States: adore, appreciate, trust (31,2) 
(be perc 
(* thing 2) 
(at perc (thing 2) (* thing 8)) (by !! 26)) 
(ii) Activities: amble, run, zigzag (51.3.2) 
(act loc (* thing 1) (by !! 26)) 
{iii) Accomplishments: destroy, obliterate (44) 
(cause (* thing 1) 
(go exist (* thing 2) 
(away_from exist (thing 2) 
(at exist (thing 2) (exist 9)))) 
(by !! 26)) 
(8) Achievements: crumple, \]old, wrinkle (45.2) 
(go ident 
(* thing 2) 
(toward ident (thing 2) 
(at ident (thing 2) (!!-ed 9)))) 
4.3 Telicity 
Telic verbs denote a situation with an inherent end 
or goal. Atelic verbs lack an inherent end, though. 
as (1) shows, they may appear in telic sentences with 
other sentence constituents. In the LCS, \[+telic\] 
verbs contain a Path of a particular type or a con- 
stant (!!) in the right-most leaf-node argument. 
Some examples are shown below: 
154 
(9) (i) leave 
(... (thing 2) 
(toward/away_from ...) (by ! ! 26)) 
(ii) enter 
(... (thing 2) ... (!!-ed 9)) 
(iii) pocket 
(... (thing 2) ... (!! 6)) 
(iv) mine 
(... (thing 2) ... (!! 4)) 
(v) create, destroy 
(... (thing 2) ... (exist 9) (by !! 26)) 
In the first case the special path component. 
toward or away_from, is the telicity indicator, in 
the next three, the (uninstantiated) constant in the 
rightmost leaf-node argument, and, in the last case, 
the special (instantiated) constant exist. 
Telic verbs include: 
(10) (i) Accomplishments: mine, quarry (10.9) 
(cause 
(* thing 1) 
(go loc (* thing 2) 
((* away from 3) loc 
(thing 2) 
(at loc (thing 2) (!! 4))))) 
(ii) Achievements: abandon, desert, leave(51.2) (go 
foe 
(* thing 2) 
(away_from loc 
(thing 2) 
(at loc (thing 2) (* thing 4)))) 
Examples of atelic verbs are given in (11). The 
(a)telic representations are especially in keeping 
with the privative feature characterization Olsen 
(1994; To appear in 1997): telic verb classes are ho- 
mogeneously represented: the LCS has a path of a 
particular type, i.e., a "reference object" at an end 
state. Atelic verbs, on the other hand. do not have 
homogeneous representations. 
(11) (i) Activities: appeal, matter (31.4) 
(act perc (* thing 1) 
(on pert (* thing 2)) (by !! 26)) 
(ii) States: wear (41.3.1) 
(be loc (* !! 2) 
(on loc (!! 2) (* thing 11))) 
5 Modifying the Lexicon 
We have examined the LCS classes with respect to 
identifying aspectual categories and determined that 
minor changes to 101 of 191 LCS class structures 
(213/390 subclasses) are necessary, including sub- 
stituting act for go ill activities and removing Path 
constituents that need not be stated lexically. For 
example, the original database entry for class 51.3.2 
is: 
(12) (go loc (* thing 2) 
((* toward 5) loc 
(thing 2) 
(at loc (thing 2) (thing 6))) 
(by !! 26)) 
This is modified to yield the following new database 
entry: 
(13) (act loc (* thing 1) (by march 26)) 
The modified entry is created by changing go to act 
and removing the ((* toward 5) ...) constituent. 
Modification of the lexicon to conform to aspec- 
tual requirements took 3 person-weeks, requiring 
1370 decision tasks at 4 minutes each: three passes 
through each of the 390 subclasses to compare the 
LCS structure with the templates for each feature 
(substantially complete) and one pass to change 
200 LCS structures to conform with the templates. 
(Fewer than ten classes need to be changed for dura- 
tivity or dynamicity, and approximately 200 of the 
390 subclasses for telicity.) With the changes we 
can automatically assign aspect to some 9000 verbs 
in existing classes. Furthermore. since 6000 of the 
verbs were classified by automatic means, new verbs 
would receive aspectual assignments automatically 
as a result of the classification algorithm. 
We are aware of no attempt in the literature to 
determine aspectual information on a similar scale, 
in part, we suspect, because of the difficulty of 
assigning features to verbs since they appear in 
sentences denoting situations of multiple aspectual 
types. Based on our experience handcoding small 
sets of verbs, we estimate generating aspectual fea- 
tures for 9000 entries would require 3.5 person- 
months (four minutes per entry), with 1 person- 
month for proofing and consistency checking, given 
unclassified verbs, organized, say, alphabetically. 
6 Aspectual Feature Determination 
for Composed LCS's 
Modifications described above reveal similarities be- 
tween verbs that carry a lexical aspect, feature as 
part of their lexical entry and sentences that have 
features as a result of LCS composition. Conse- 
quently, the algorithm that we developed for ver- 
ifying aspectual conformance of the LCS database 
is also directly applicable to aspectual feature de- 
termination in LCSs that have been composed from 
verbs and other relevant sentence constituents. LCS 
composition is a fundamental operation in two appli- 
cations for which the LCS serves as an interlingua: 
machine translation (Dorr et al.. 1993) and foreign 
language tutoring (Dorr et al., 1995b: Sams. I993: 
Weinberg et al., 1995). Aspectual feature determina- 
tion applies to the composed LCS by first, assigning 
unspecified feature values--atelic \[@T\], non-durative 
\[@R\], and stative \[@D\]--and then monotonically set- 
ting these to positive values according to the pres- 
ence of certain constituents. 
The formal specification of the aspectual feature 
determination algorithm is shown in Figure 1. The 
first step initializes all aspectual values to be un- 
specified. Next the top node is examined for mem- 
bership in a set of telicity indicators (CAUSE, LET, 
155 
Given an LCS representation L: 
I. Initialize: T(L):=\[0T\], D(L):=\[0R\], R(L):=\[0D\] 
2. If Top node of L E {CAUSE, LET, GO} 
Then T(L):=\[+T\] 
If Top node of L E {CAUSE, LET} 
Then D(L):=\[+D\], R(L):=t+R\] 
If Top node of L 6 {GO} 
Then D(L}:=\[+D\] 
3. If Top node of L E {ACT, BE. STAY} 
Then If Internal node of 
L E {TO, TOWARD, FORTemp} 
Then T(L):=\[+T\] 
If Top node of L 6 {BE, STAY} 
Then R(L):=\[+R\] 
If Top node of L E {ACT} 
Then set D(L):=\[+D\], R(L):=\[+R\] 
4. Return T(L), D(L), R(L). 
Figure 1: Algorithm for Aspectual Feature Determi- 
nation 
GO); if there is a match, the LCS is assumed to be 
\[+T\]. In this case, the top node is further checked for 
membership in sets that indicate dynamicity \[+D\] 
and durativity \[+R\]. Then the top node is exam- 
ined for membership in a set of atelicity indicators 
(ACT, BE, STAY); if there is a match, the LCS is 
further examined for inclusion of a telicizing com- 
ponent, i.e., TO, TOWARD, FORT¢~p. The LCS 
is assumed to be \[@T\] unless one of these telicizing 
components is present. In either case, the top node 
is further checked for membership in sets that indi- 
cate dynamicity \[+D\] and durativity \[+R\]. Finally, 
the results of telicity, dynamicity, and durativity as- 
signments are returned. 
The advantage of using this same algorithm for 
determination of both verbal and sentential aspect 
is that it is possible to use the same mechanism to 
perform two independent tasks: (1) Determine in- 
herent aspectual features associated with a lexical 
item; (2) Derive non-inherent aspectual features as- 
sociated with combinations of lexical items. 
Note, for example, that adding the path l0 the 
bridge to the \[@relic\] verb entry in (3) establishes 
a \[+relic\] value for the sentence as a whole, an in- 
terpretation available by the same algorithm that 
identifies verbs as telic in the LCS lexicon: 
(14) (i) \[Otelic\]: 
(act lee (* thing 1) (by march 26)) 
(ii) \[+telic\]: 
(cause 
(act loc (soldier) (by march)) 
(to loc (soldier) 
(at loc (soldier) (bridge)))) 
In our applications, access to both verbal and sen- 
tential lexical aspect features facilitates the task of 
lexieal choice in machine translation and interpreta- 
tion of students' answers in foreign language tutor- 
ing. For example, our machine translation system 
selects appropriate translations based on the match- 
ing of telicity values for the output sentence, whether 
or not the verbs in the language match in telicity. 
The English atelic manner verb march and the telic 
PP across the field from (1) is best translated into 
Spanish as the telic verb cruzar with the manner 
marchando as an adjunct.: 
(15) (i) E: Tile soldier marched across the field. 
S: El soldado cruz6 el campo marchando. 
(ii) (cause 
(act loc (soldier) (by march)) 
(to loc (soldier) 
(across loc (soldier) (field)))) 
Similarly, in changing the Weekend Verbs (i.e.. 
December, holiday, summer, weekend, etc.) tem- 
plate to telic, we make use of the measure phrase 
(for terap .. ,) which was previously available. 
though not employed, as a mechanism in our 
database. Thus, we now have a lexicalized exam- 
pie of 'doing something for a certain time' that 
has a representation corresponding to the canonical 
telic frame V for an hour phrase, as in The soldier 
marched for an hour: 
(16) (act loc (soldier) (by march) 
(for temp (*head*) (hour))) 
This same telicizing constituent--which is compo- 
sitionally derived in the crawl construction--is en- 
coded directly in the lexical entry for a verb such as 
December: 
(17) (stay loc 
(* thing 2) 
((* \[at\] 5) loc (thing 2) (thing 6)) 
(for temp (*head*) (december 31))) 
This lexical entry is composed with other argu- 
ments to produce the LCS for .John Decembered at 
the new cabin: 
(18) (stay loc (john) 
(at loc (john) (cabin (new))) 
(for temp (ahead*) (december))) 
This same LCS would serve as the underlying 
representation for the equivalent Spanish sentence. 
which uses an atelic verb estar 4 in colnbination with 
a telnporal adjunct durance el m.es de Diciembre: 
John estuvo en la cabafia nueva durance el mes de 
Diciembre (literally, John was in lhe new cabin dur- 
ing lhe month of December). 
The monotonic composition permitted by the 
LCS templates is slightly different than that perlnit- 
ted by the privative feature model of aspect (Olsen. 
1994; Olsen, To appear in 1997). For example, in tiw 
LCS states may be composed into an achievement or 
accomplishment structure, because states are part 
4Since estar may be used with both relic {'estar alto) 
and atelic (estar contento) readings, we analyze it as 
atelic to permit appropriate composition. 
156 
of the substructure of these classes (cf. templates 
in (6)). They may not, however, appear as activi- 
ties. The privative model in Table 2 allows states to 
become activities and accomplishments, by adding 
\[+dynamic\] and \[+telic\] features, but they may not 
become achievements, since removal of the \[+dura- 
tive\] feature would be required. The nature of the 
alternations between states and events is a subject 
for future research. 
7 Conclusion 
The privative feature model, on which our LCS com- 
position draws, allows us to represent verbal and 
sentential lexical aspect as monotonic composition 
of the same type, and to identify the contribution 
of both verbs and other elements. The lexical as- 
pect of verbs and sentences may be therefore deter- 
mined from the corresponding LCS representations, 
as in the examples provided from machine transla- 
tion and foreign language tutoring applications. We 
are aware of no attempt in the literature to represent 
and access aspect on a similar scale, in part, we sus- 
pect, because of the difficulty of identifying the as- 
pectual contribution of the verbs and sentences given 
the multiple aspectual types in which verbs appear. 
An important corollary to this investigation is 
that it is possible to refine the lexicon, because vari- 
able meaning may, in many cases, be attributed to 
lexical aspect variation predictable by composition 
rules. In addition, factoring out the structural re- 
quirements of specific lexical items from the pre- 
dictable variation that may be described by com- 
position provides information on the aspectual ef- 
fect of verbal modifiers and complements. We are 
therefore able to describe not only the lexical aspect 
at the sentential level, but also the set of aspectual 
variations available to a given verb type. 

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