Inner Aspect and Event

Abstract

In this chapter, I look more closely at the syntactic heads that make up the predicate phrase. First, I argue that the functional category within the VP whose Spec is the landing site of certain derived objects is (Inner) Aspect. More specifically, I argue that the VP has shells, in the sense of Larson (1988) and that Aspect is a projection sandwiched within these shells. Morpheme orders in Tagalog and Navajo are used to show how the phrase structure proposed accounts for the interleaving of lexical and inflectional material. In the second half of the chapter, I argue for another functional category, E(vent), which is at the boundary between the lexical domain of the VP and the purely inflectional domain. Just as Inner Aspect is an event-related category at the edge of V2P, Event is an event-related category at the edge of V1P.