On the relationship between lexical aspect, verbal meaning, and (lexical) argument structure

This paper discusses to what extent the lexical aspectual nature of events is determined by verbal meaning, argument structure, or argument realisation patterns. It argues against the determination of lexical aspect by isolated verbs or by the verb and its argument(s). Instead, based on a lexical-syntactic approach, but integrating insights from Distributed Morphology, this proposal suggests that a minimal element of lexical argument structure, the inner lexical head, encodes all the information that is needed to identify the lexical aspectual nature of events.