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<Paper uid="P95-1052">
  <Title>Aspect and Discourse Structure: Is a Neutral Viewpoint Required?*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="326" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Viewpoint and Situation Aspect
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    <Paragraph position="0"> 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 &amp;quot; 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).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 1Besides the situation aspect described by the semantic 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 &amp;quot;conceptual features&amp;quot; of situation aspects which have binary values \[-4-\], namely stative, duratire 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 situation are indicated by I and F respectively. The duration of the situation can be drawn in two different 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).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Aspectually vague sentences which provide either an open or a closed reading back up Smith's consid-ZSee Smith (1991) for a detailed discussion.  erations (Smith, 1991:120). 3 However, she restricts her analysis to single sentences and neglects the effects viewpoints can have in a discourse. We will therefore focus on this issue in the next section.</Paragraph>
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