Núria Alturo
Universitat de Barcelona
This paper raises the question of the various explanations a topic may be given when different units of analysis are taken under consideration. The discussion focuses on sentential and discursive readings of aspect. At sentential level, aspect is shown as a semantic property of words, morphemes, the combination of a predicate and its arguments (inner aspect), or the combination of a predicate structure and one or several adverbial modifiers (outer aspect). At discourse level (verbal and multimodal), aspect is shown as the textual form of two general cognitive mechanisms which speakers jointly use to build a particular mental image of an entity (individual, concept, or situation): summary (vs sequential) scanning and perception of movement. Narrative, expository and descriptive chunks of discourse reveal these cognitive mechanisms, as well as aspectual and some non-aspectual resources at the sentence level do.