ABSTRACT
In § 1 I provide an overview of my analysis of grammatical aspect and the set of interpretations it predicts, in combination with the privative analysis of the lexical aspect features outlined in chapter two: situations with marked lexical aspect features have a uniform interpretation in each grammatical aspect form (imperfective and perfective), whereas the interpretation of situations unmarked for a given feature vary. In §§2 and 3 I use data from the literature on a variety of languages to demonstrate that the predicted interpretations occur. I also show that situations with marked lexical aspect features behave as a class with respect to language-specific instantiations of the grammatical aspects: forms in some languages which appear to differ from the
model of imperfective and perfective aspect presented here may be analyzed as restricted application of grammatical aspect to situations marked for a given feature in the ET-RT intersection area. In §4 I argue that imperfective and perfective represent independent privative oppositions; I support this analysis by giving examples of languages which mark one aspect but not the other, as well as those which mark both independently, sometimes on the same verb form. I demonstrate that the interpretation of the unmarked forms is predictably variable and that the default interpretation depends on a language's inventory of marked forms. In §5 I discuss other aspectual interpretations, which some have attributed to imperfective and perfective forms, providing evidence that these interpretations-habitual, iterative, and ingressive-depend on properties orthogonal to grammatical aspect. I conclude in §6.
