Aspectual shift in Romance: A preliminary study

Abstract

Bare plurals in English are known to induce a shift in the aspectual properties of verbal complexes, turning telic eventualities into atelic ones. In this respect, they contrast with singular indefinites (e.g., a) and non-specific plural indefinites (e.g., some) which have been claimed to not trigger such an aspectual shift. In this work, we address two questions: (i) how much different types of indefinites vary in their ability to cause aspectual shift and (ii) what happens to aspectual shift in languages where bare plurals have a more constrained distribution than in English or are altogether unattested. We investigate these questions through two experimental studies in three closely related Romance languages: French, Italian and Romanian. We also discuss consequences of our findings for current theoretical proposals on the topic. To our knowledge, this work constitutes the first attempt to investigate aspectual shift across languages experimentally.