A Multiple Aspect Projection Approach to English Internal Aspect

It has been widely argued in the literature that unlike external aspect, internal aspect must be analyzed by way of the so-called argument-to-verb mapping interpretation (Borer, 2005; MacDonald, 2006; Travis, 2010; Portner, 2018 among many others). A single aspect projection analysis has been preferred so far in order to account for the two distinct aspectual features, telicity and durativity (MacDonald, 2006; Han & Song, 2020). However, this dose not seem to be totally free from certain theoretical and empirical drawbacks. Instead, an alternative syntactic analysis based on the multi-layered aspectual structure is proposed in this paper. Under out proposed structure, telicity must be separately projected from durativity in terms of internal aspect. In particular, three different eventive predicates (e.g. active, achievement and accomplishment verbs) can be better accounted for by positing two functional projections, DurP and TelP, between vP and VP. Compared to the previous single-layered structure, out multi-layered structure gives us a better syntactic analysis from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.