Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

In (1), factoring out tense as much as possible (which is necessary in English since
present tense perfectives and imperfectives interact in complex ways with the origo of the
deixis [“now”]), 13 the same predicate can appear in either the unmarked perfective or the
imperfective.
What is known as lexical aspect has to do with types of predicates (where
“predicate” is used as a cover term to refer to both bare verbs as well as verb + direct
object combinations) classified on the basis of a number of seemingly unrelated
questions:
(a) Does the event that the predicate refers to have a natural endpoint?
(b) Does the predicate refer to an event that requires a certain span of time in which
it takes places?
(c) Can the event referred to by the predicate be broken down into distinct stages
that differ in the degree to which the event is completed in each stage?
(d) Does the event referred to by the predicate take place because of the activity of
the subject of the sentence?
Based on a lengthy tradition of study that, at least in its modern phase, begins with
Vendler (1967) and passes through a crucial transformation in Dowty’s redescription
(1979), Agha (1993, 127-153) has proposed that these differences between predicates can
13 An “origo of deixis” is a point with respect to which deictics of one kind or another are evaluated: given two acts of
deictic reference oriented with respect to the same origo of deixis, the choice of which is a “near” deictic, “this,” and
which is a “far” deictic, “that,” is determined by spatiotemporal proximity to the origo of deixis.
98