A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches

Annemarie Friedrich, Nianwen Xue, Alexis Palmer

Abstract: Aspectual meaning refers to how the internal temporal structure of situations is presented. This includes whether a situation is described as a state or as an event, whether the situation is finished or ongoing, and whether it is viewed as a whole or with a focus on a particular phase. This survey gives an overview of computational approaches to modeling lexical and grammatical aspect along with intuitive explanations of the necessary linguistic concepts and terminology. In particular, we describe the concepts of stativity, telicity, habituality, perfective and imperfective, as well as influential inventories of eventuality and situation types. Aspect is a crucial component of semantics, especially for precise reporting of the temporal structure of situations, and future NLP approaches need to be able to handle and evaluate it systematically.