The Seeds of Aspect

This presentation evaluates the two most influential hypotheses about the the acquisition of aspect up to date, namely, the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen 1986) and the Discourse Hypothesis (Bardovi-Harlig 1994) from a formal perspective. It is argued that the two hypotheses are based on constructs of different nature and have different theoretical status. In particular it is argued that the rational underpinning Lexical Aspect Hypothesis is dubious while the Discourse Hypothesis rests on firmer grounds, since Aspect can be proved to contain a syntactic head sensitive to discursive information