A Construal-Based Approach to English Aspect

The aim of this study is to investigate English Aspect from the viewpoint of cognitive dynamic construal of scanning. To achieve that, Langacker’s construal theory (1987, 1991, 2008, 2013) is used to provide a complete dynamic interpretation of the aspect system of English language. The two main types of aspects are the situational aspect and the viewpoint aspect. While the viewpoint component is focused on how people interpret events, the situation aspect deals with how events are composed. Based on their grammatical properties, English verbs can be divided into two fundamental categories: active (perfective) and stative (imperfective). The grammatical characteristics of verbs are regarded as "symptomatic" of a conceptual contrast since they are not stable and can be affected by a variety of construal-related circumstances. Therefore, it is hypothesized that Langacker’s construal of scanning is sufficient in providing a full picture of English aspect. Moreover, aspect cooperates with tense in the cognitive grounding of an event.


Introduction
Aspect is an alternative method of assessing the internal temporal components of a situation, according to Comrie (1976).The situation aspect and the viewpoint aspect are the two different categories of aspects.The situation aspect deals with how events are constituted, whereas the viewpoint component is concerned with how people perceive events.Traditional definitions of completion correspond to event locations more clearly than they do to event perspectives.Slavic, non-Slavic, or complete: incomplete has been replaced by perfective: incomplete.These aspectual refinements can be inferred even though it is debatable whether any English verbs principally encode either of these features.For example, when simple past and past progressive forms are contrasted, the perfective aspect presents a broad enough view of a situation to include the situation's endpoints by virtue of its perfective aspect, whereas the imperfective aspect presents a view of the time periods over which a situation progresses while leaving the situation's endpoints out of its scope.
Traditional linguists hypothesized two basic classes of English verbs -active (perfective) and stative (imperfective) based on the basis of their grammatical behaviors.specifically, perfectives do not occur in the simple present tense but they do take the progressive with be...-ing, whereas the opposite is true in the case of imperfectives.According to Vendler (1967 cited in Langacker, 2011) perfective verbs include the concepts of achievement, accomplishment, and activity while imperfectives subsume stative verbs.Activity verbs are similar to other perfectives with respect to the present tense and the progressive.However, the processes they designate are construed as being internally homogeneous, yet, they are conceived as occurring in bounded episodes (Langacker, 2011).The grammatical behaviour (perfectives / imperfectives) is, then, elucidated by the conceptual characterization.In cognitive grammar, Langacker (1987Langacker ( , 1991) ) viewed verbs' grammatical behaviours as being "symptomatic" of a conceptual contrast, meaning that there are numerous reasons that might cause them to change how they are classified as a result of the concept of construal.The perfectives' progressive shape has the effect of perfectivizing imperfections.Its application to imperfectives hence frequently becomes redundant.Immediate temporal scopes that are internal to their bounds are imposed by perfective processes.The end process becomes imperfective because the aspect of bounding is ineffective within the immediate scope [the main distinction between perfectives and imperfectives is the bounding characteristic].In order to elucidate English aspect, this study aims at investigating English Aspect from the perspective of cognitive dynamic construal of scanning.Also, whether Langacker's cognitive mode of scanning is sufficient for the analysis of the English verbs' grammatical behaviours.

Literature Review
According to Binnick (1991: 140), the concept, aspect was not firmly established in linguistic discussion until Jakobson's work.He believes that the term aspect first appeared in Western European linguistics in the early nineteenth century, but that it was only at the end of the century that it became part of the "linguistic heritage."(Cook,2012) Differences in the temporal organization of occurrences are described by the situation aspect.Aristotle's insights led to the identification of structural differences among occurrences.The Extended-Now (XN) hypothesis of the perfect was proposed by Heny (1982).According to this view, the perfect helps to locate some event within a temporal interval stretching back from a specific reference time; the reference time for a (non-embedded) present tense sentence is the time of utterance.
The Aristotelian distinction between movements and actualities has served as a foundation for current philosophical arguments over event structure.The most famous of these debates is Vendler's (1967 cited in Cook, 2012) Aspectual Categories with English Examples, in which he defined a four-way distinction between states, activities, achievements, and accomplishments.The correlations between these situational factors can be portrayed in a variety of ways.Based on the parameters of dynamicity (defined in terms of progression) and telicity (defined in terms of whether the NP contains a specified quantity), Verkuyl 1993 regarded accomplishments and achievements as "events," whereas Smith (1997) distinguishes between states and activities on the one hand, and accomplishments and achievements on the other.As Rothstein's (2004) example shows the four situation aspects can be appropriately separated based on just two features.With the feature telic, he distinguishes accomplishments and achievements from states and activities.An inherent terminus characterizes telic events.Moreover, the concept stages have been used to describe dynamicity, which distinguishes activities and accomplishments from both states and achievements, in contrast to Smith's theory, which distinguishes states from the other three situation aspects based on static/dynamic qualities.Rothstein (2004) describes both states and achievements as stage-less because they lack the sense of progression and are essentially non-dynamic, and achievements because they are near instantaneous.
Through entailment (known as the imperfective paradox), the progressive (or imperfective) can also be used to distinguish between telic and atelic situation aspect.Activities telic-less in the progressive (or imperfective) imply their perfect or perfective counterpart, although accomplishments and achievements telic do not.as shown by the following instances: Brad is walking entails Brad has walked/walked, John is building a house does not entail John has built/built a house, Brad is winning the race does not entail Brad has won/won the race.(Cook, 2012) The semelfactives feature is included by Smith (1997).Semelfactives, such as knock or wink, are dynamic, instantaneous events with no natural endpoint; their instantaneous nature is demonstrated by their compatibility with at time temporal expressions, as in Brad knocked on my door at 12 a.m.However, Rothstein (2004) argues that including semelfactives is problematic because it would necessitate the addition of a third feature; instead, he proposes that semelfactives be described as 'miminal event types of activities,' based on the fact that 'every semelfactive has a homonym that is an activity.'Moreover, in her taxonomy, Olsen (1997) included stage-level states.Individuallevel states depict an entity's "fundamental, permanent properties," whereas stage-level states depict properties that are temporary or "accidental" (Fernald 2000: 4) The perspectives of certain linguists focused on morphology and syntax, whereas the perspectives of others were more semantic in nature (Binnick 1991).However, because phasal aspect is non-grammatical, optional, and ad hoc, the semantic ambiguities must be defined as metalinguistic categories.The difficulty to distinguish consistently between phasal aspect and situation and/or viewpoint aspect in the literature appears to be due to the many approaches to phasal aspect.Some phasal aspectual distinctions appear to be derived, coming from certain semantic combinations, as the name implies.Smith (1997: 49)  With reference to viewpoint aspect, Comrie's (1976: 3) definition of aspect is widely cited: "Aspects are alternative ways of interpreting the internal temporal constituents of a situation."The viewpoint aspect, which deals with people's perspectives on events, contrasts markedly with the situation aspect, which deals with the structure of occurrences.The traditional definition of completion is more easily related with event location than with event perspectives.Perfective: imperfective has overtaken Slavic, non-Slavic or complete: incomplete.Although it is debatable whether any English verbs predominantly encode either of these features, these aspectual refinements can be inferred, as when Simple Past and Past Progressive forms are contrasted (Bybee, et al., 1994).The imperfective aspect presents a view of the portions of time over which a situation progresses while leaving the situation's endpoints out of its scope, whereas the perfective aspect presents a broad enough view of a situation to include the situation's endpoints but does not distinguish in detail the segments of time over which it progresses.
Although the perfective: imperfective contradiction is fundamental to the topic of viewpoint aspect, other sorts of viewpoint aspects include perfect and progressive.The perfect and progressive interact with tense and other aspectual types in the same manner that the perfective and imperfective pair does, but they are semantically distinguishable.

Model of Analysis
From a cognitive grammar point of view, Scanning comes into play.Scanning is a method of cognitive processing that is suited for the analysis of aspect.A complicated atemporal relation is made up of a series of stative relations that have been scanned in a summarized manner.In profiling a succession of relational configurations, a process is similar to a complicated atemporal relation, but it has a few additional characteristics: the component states are understood as being spread over time; these states are scanned sequentially; and the trajector is always a thing (never a relation) (Hamawand, 2016).Individuals can make predictions that can be checked experimentally on occasion.Langacker (1991Langacker ( , 2008) ) provided a significant example to show the process of scanning and the way individuals conceptualize events.

Sequential vs. Summary Scanning
The difference between 'sequential' and 'summary scanning' is used to distinguish between a process and a complicated atemporal relation.Individuals use sequential scanning to digest information whether viewing a movie or monitoring a ball as it passes through the air.Individuals follow along from one state to the next as the conceived event unfolds.The successive states of the conceived event are activated serially and more or less instantly, so that the activation of one state begins to decline as the activation of its successor begins; essentially, individuals follow along from one state to the next as the event unfolds.Individuals, on the other hand, use summary scanning to mentally reconstruct the trajectory a ball has taken (in identifying a pitch as a curve, fastball, or slider and diagraming its degree of curvature).The component states are engaged in a sequential but cumulative manner (that is, once activated, they remain active throughout), until they are all coactivated as a single, simultaneously accessible whole.The distinction between a complicated atemporal relation (such as across) and the equivalent verb (cross) is thus due to the manner of scanning used in their activation -a matter of conventional imagery.Sequential scanning is an alternative method of cognitive processing.Sequential scanning, as the title indicates, entails the transformation of one configuration into another, or a series of such transformations.Each configuration serves as a standard for an act of comparison (possibly quite complex) that constitutes a recognition of disparity between it and the next, and each configuration serves as a standard for an act of comparison (possibly quite complex) that constitutes a recognition of disparity between it and the next.Recognition of discrepancy equates to recognition of change since the scenes are evaluated sequentially rather than simultaneously.In contrast to summary scanning, the individual components (states) are not considered as coexisting or simultaneously available, hence there is no inconsistency judgment.It's not far-fetched to compare the differences between summary and sequential scanning to the differences between looking at a photograph and watching a movie; indeed, people's capacity to examine both photos and movies exemplifies and supports the validity of both forms of processing.
A remark regarding time is required.The distinction between summary and sequential scanning is in the relative timing of processing events, not in the perceived location of a scene or its components in the stream of objective time (ibid).It's natural to think of them as being located in a continuous series of points in time, and this is exactly what happens in a normal process prediction.Individuals do, however, have the mental flexibility to separate processing time from people's perceptions of objective time, which is important for linguistic structural analysis, particularly in terms of aspect.Individuals are thus perfectly capable of doing sequential scanning with respect to a setting that is thought to be stable across time.In English verbs, the most significant aspectual distinction is between what Langacker (1987) terms Perfectives and imperfectives processes.Perfectives and imperfectives are understood through common grammatical criteria, perfectives occur in the progressive, but not in the simple present whereas imperfectives occur in the simple tense, but not in the progressive.He argued that an imperfective process describes the extension through time of a stable situation, and by contrast, a perfective process portrays a situation as changing through time.Also, he claims that the perfective/ imperfective and count/mass distinctions are specifically identical.As for the properties of homogeneity, expansibility, bounding, and replicability, Langacker argues that verbs and nouns are intimately related.
A perfective process is apprehended as being bounded in time.This bounding is considered an integral part of the characterization of such a process i.e. one of the requirements to identify an instance of the type (Langacker, 2011).This is not a process to be considered internally homogeneous (involvement of change through time); the constitutive relations (time-slices) differ from instant to instant through time.Therefore, this kind of process is not contractive (one instant does not represent all the instances) and then it is replicable.An imperfective process, on the other hand, indefinite temporal extension i.e. opposite to the perfective process, it is not bound in time and bounding is not an essential characterization.Moreover, this type of process is considered as being internally homogeneous.Therefore, it provides a qualitative means of identification (part of the instant represents the overall process).Also, an imperfective process is non-replicable i.e. when combining two instances, they become one longer instance.
In terms of progressive construction, it is quite obvious to consider progressive as a grammatical difference between Perfectives and imperfectives.In perfectives processes, there is an occurrence of progressive construction while in imperfectives processes there is no occurrence of progressive construction.The reason is that the progressive is imperfectivizing i.e. its occurrence with imperfectives would be redundant and unnecessary.The semantic influence of addinging to a verb class is to change a process to an atemporal relation.Therefore, individuals apply the progressive construction in describing one present-time instance of a perfective process.
For the consideration of basic grammatical categories, Abstract nouns and nominalizations are always considered problematic (from an objectivist perspective of linguistic semantics) in the sense that they seem far less imposing when meaning is equated with cognitive processing, with conventional imagery properly adapted.Langacker (1987Langacker ( , 1991) ) argues that abstract (verb and noun) contrast semantically because they apply different images to form the same conceptual content: as a verb, it imposes a processual construal on the profiled event, while as a noun, portrays it as an abstract region.Nominalizing verb necessarily enhances it with the conceptual properties characteristic of nouns.Langacker (1987) considers the noun and verb categories as universal and significant to grammatical structure.He tried to point out that the usual arguments for this position is crucially dependent; he adopted the basis of cognitive grammar arguing that the approach of cognitive grammar makes radically different assumptions, and arrives at very different conclusions i.e. by adopting a conceptualist, imagist view of linguistic semantics, it is possible to achieve a notional characterization of the noun and verb classes, as well as their major subclasses, because this approach has arrived to a highly coherent and revealing analysis.He, then, argues that through cognitive conceptualization, processing time, event coordination, relative prominence, figure/ground alignment, levels of organization, sequential scanning, bounding, degrees of schematicity, scope of predication, effective homogeneity all can be managed and taken into consideration.
In cognitive grammar, Langacker (1987Langacker ( , 1990) considered the grammatical behaviors of verbs as being 'symptomatic' of a conceptual contrast i.e. their behaviors are not stable, there are multiple factors that can alternate their categorization due to the notion of construal.The progressive form of the perfectives serves an imperfectivizing function.Therefore, its application to imperfectives tends to be redundant.Perfective processes impose immediate temporal scopes internal to their boundaries.Because the facet of bounding is not that effective with the immediate scope, then the outcome process becomes imperfective [the key distinction between perfectives and imperfectives is the bounding characteristic].In addition, both of these processes are linked with distinct 'modes of apprehension'.In other words, in order to identify a perfective process, one must observe the 'entirety' of that process (because such a process is not internally homogeneous).Whereas in the case of imperfective processes, entirety is not an issue i.e. any portion of the process is considered as a sufficient sample for the identification of the whole process (internally homogeneous).

Application
The construal dimension of scanning is used to analyze both Lexical as well as Grammatical aspect.

Lexical Aspect
Psycholinguists have begun to examine the cognitive reality of lexical aspect and how it is processed in the previous decade.Aspectual classes and shifts from one aspectual class to another, i.e., aspectual coercion, are two types of studies currently available.McKoon and Macfarland (2002) were among the first to investigate the processing implications of Dowty's decompositional studies (1979).They showed that accomplishments (cause become in-state) are fundamentally more complicated than accomplishments (become in-state) based on reading times and lexical decision times.Gennari and Poeppel (2003) examined eventive and stative predicates (which included successes, achievements, and activities) and found that the former were more difficult to understand.Brennan and Pylkkänen (2010) expanded on this line of research by comparing accomplishments (e.g., scare) to statives (e.g., treasure) using reading time methodologies and magnetoencephalography (MEG).They also compared simple psychological statives to modified statements that needed force (e.g., the kid treasured the beautiful kitty within half an hour).Achievements were more difficult to interpret than statives, according to reading times and MEG data, and the increased semantic complexity resulted in different MEG components than aspectualcoercion.Finally, Coll-Florit and Gennari (2011) contrasted the reading times of statives with punctual event predicates (mainly achievements), finding that statives took longer to read than event predicates.They attributed this result, which goes against what a decomposition analysis would predict, to the fact that durativesituations occur in more semantically different settings and elicit more various associations than event predicates, which could vary the processing effort required.The existing research, taken collectively, give evidence for differences in complexity between the aspectual classes, bolstering decompositional analyses.However, not all concerns have been fully resolved, and more research is needed.Aspectual coercion is the subject of the second line of research.The key study topic was whether or not aspectual coercion is a complicated process.Existing research has almost entirely concentrated on one sort of coercion, namely, the coercion of point action verbs into an iterative interpretation.The results are once again mixed.Early research using secondary tasks such as cross-modal lexical decision or stop making sense assessments showed support for coercive costs (Todorova et al. 2000).Pickering et al. ( 2006) employed the identical materials as the previous studies, but instead of an added activity, they evaluated a coerced meaning during normal reading.They discovered that aspectual coercion was no more challenging than their aspectual control conditions in two self-paced reading and two eye tracking studies.They proposed the aspectual under specification theory, which states that the aspectual representation remains imprecise during normal reading, based on this lack of effect.Brennan and Pylkkänen (2008) disputed this approach, reporting a coercion impact of coercion sentences such as (1a) in comparison to aspectual controls (1b) in both self-paced reading and MEG; they based their findings on a rating research that carefully chose obvious instances of point action verbs.Their MEG analysis demonstrated activation in the anterior middle area, a MEG component that has also been reported in non-aspectual cases of coercion.According to the mode of scanning, example (1a) shows sequential scanning i.e. the action happened repeatedly throughout a certain period of time whereas (1b) shows summary scanning i.e. the action happened once at a certain point in time and finished.
1-a.Throughout the day, John coughed in the office.b.After twenty minutes, John coughed in the office.The semantic difference between (2a) and (2b), for example, is in the direction of summary scanning.By mentally scanning along the scar's extension in one way or the other, as described by the from-and to-s, the conceptualizer builds up to a full picture of the scar's configuration.Furthermore, the order in which words are spoken causes us to access the concepts they represent in the same order.These two conceptual orderings are aligned in (2a,b): people first meet the from-which specifies where mental scanning begins, and subsequently the to-, which specifies where it concludes.From a processing standpoint, this path alignment is ideal. 2 -a.An ugly scar extends from his wrist to his elbow.
b.An ugly scar extends from his elbow to his wrist.
c.An ugly scar extends to his wrist from his elbow.However, in (2c), the two pathways are in direct opposition to one another.Scanning along the scar begins at the elbow, but the word sequence focuses attention to the wrist, which is the scanning path's endpoint.As a result, a conceptual account based on dynamicity necessitates backtracking: after processing the entire expression first, the conceptualizer must back up and reconceptualize the entire scanning path in the appropriate order in order to comprehend the overall configuration effectively.This leads to an experimental prediction: (2c) should take longer and need more work to analyze than the other expressions.As a result, a common critique of cognitive linguistics is incorrect: it makes no predictions.It is true, however, that its predictions are relativistic rather than absolute.In particular, evaluating objectively discernible qualities of the nominal referent does not allow one to make a yes/no forecast regarding a noun's cooccurrence with stand (Hamawand, 2016).What matters is how a situation is interpreted, which requires both general and contextual information as well as the entire spectrum of an individual's imaginative and interpretative abilities.Summary scanning can be used to visualize a situation that evolves over time; that is, its several phases can be mentally superimposed and regarded as a single complex configuration with all of its facets coactivated and available at the same time.As shown by the disparity between sentences (3a) and (3b), this is a crucial aspect in nominalization 3 -a.The ball curved.
b.He threw a curve.4 -a.He fell.
b.He took a fall.
(4a) involving sequential scanning of the process of falling, (4b) suggests the semantic import of the noun fall, where the same event is construed with summary scanning.

Grammatical Aspect
In psycholinguistics, the grammatical aspect has recently attracted much interest.One field of research has looked into the accessibility of event participants in English progressive and simple sentences (Ferretti et al. 2007).They show that, in accordance with the abovementioned language description, the progressive provides an event from the inside out, making participants, instruments, and locations fully available, whereas the simple forms exhibit events as complete units with limited access to event participants.Madden and Zwaan (2003) discovered that after reading a sentence containing an accomplishment verb in the simple past, participants were faster and more likely to choose a picture depicting a completed event rather than a picture depicting an ongoing event.This means that English speakers encode simple previous accomplishments as entire events.They examined achievements that described a path, such as Jack jogging/was jogging to the woods and then stretching when he arrived.Participants listened to these words while dragging and dropping a human character into a visual scenario with a computer mouse.Many drops occurred at the beginning and middle of the trail when hearing a statement in the past progressive, but most drops occurred at the end of the road in the simple past.Surprisingly, the differences were not categorical in nature.Even in the simple past, the character was positioned much ahead of the path's finish in several trials.This means that successes in the past are consistent with occurrences that were only partially completed.
There are clear cross linguistic distinctions in grammatical aspects.This raises the question of whether the grammatical system has an impact on cognitive language processing.Von Stutterheim et al. (2009) compared event descriptions produced from English, German, and Dutch speakers while watching and describing a silent video clip.They found out that there are distinct discrepancies between the three languages' performances.The progressive was employed by English speakers to begin event descriptions well before the endpoint was visible (for example, A bus is moving down a lane... to a barn).Germans, on the other hand, behaved differently, linking their descriptions to the conclusion of a motion occurrence.As a result, it appears that production is limited by the language in which it is realized.Von Stutterheim et al. (2012) recently extended this area of study to a sample of seven languages, demonstrating that a language's aspectual features influence how speakers understand events.Not only did speakers of different languages communicate differently about motion events (for example, the mention of endpoints), but their language also altered their viewing behavior and memory capacity for those sections of the scene that corresponded to endpoints.
5-The workers paved the street for two years, but then the engineers refused their outcome.Languages with the grammatical ability to indicate an aspectual difference via alternative forms-for example, English progressive vs. simple forms-enforce instant aspectual commitment, whereas languages without this capability would leave it unspecified, i.e.German readers will leave it up to the context to determine if an accomplishment reflects a complete or incomplete event, whereas English readers will quickly strengthen a basic accomplishment into a complete event interpretation.They consider this strengthening to be a pragmatic process resulting from competition between different grammatical forms.Vendler (1967)  13-a.*Brad is believing that he can make money out of sleeping.b.Brad is kicking the ball.Throughout the application of the cognitive mode of scanning in both lexical and grammatical aspect, it is possible to conclude that, the conceptualizer in the perfective aspect sequentially shifts their mental eyes from one point in the sequence to another and constructs the scene through time [temporally].In the imperfective aspect, however, the conceptualizer moves their mental eyes towards the entirety of the situation and simultaneously accumulates their impressions into one image, the scene, then, is construed atemporally.Although it seems complex to analyze aspect without having to shed light into the analysis of tense, summary and sequential scanning can provide significant semantic interpretation of the scene.

Conclusion
Aspect is an alternative method of assessing the internal temporal components of a situation.The situational aspect and the viewpoint aspect are the two primary categories of aspect.The grammatical properties of verbs are dynamic and are influenced by a number of construalrelated factors.Due to its perfective nature, the perfective aspect gives a comprehensive enough view of a circumstance to encompass the situation's endpoints, whereas the imperfective aspect just shows the time periods over which a situation develops and excludes the situation's endpoints from its scope.Dynamicity can be seen by using the scanning mode.The distinction in this mode is whether or not the scene being depicted is in motion.By constructing a complicated scene either temporally or atemporally, speakers show their adaptability.Events are conceptualized separately and experienced one after the other over time in temporal construal.The speaker uses a cognitive strategy known as sequential scanning, which is the mental act of serially construing a situation as it changes over time.The verb's tense and agreement on the linguistic level reflect this.In the atemporal construal, however, events are perceived collectively and simultaneously experienced as one portrayal.The speaker uses summary scanning as a cognitive strategy, which is the act of concurrently and cumulatively construing the entirety of the situation.Linguistically, examples of this type of construal include complementizes like the to-infinitive and theing gerund, as well as morphemes like the -ed past participle and the -ing present participle.Perfective verbs include the concepts of achievement, accomplishment, and activity while imperfectives subsume stative verbs.perfective verbs are conceived as occurring in bounded episodes whereas imperfectives are unbounded.The grammatical behaviour (perfectives/imperfectives), then, can be clarified by the dynamic construal of scanning.In addition, aspect, whether lexical or grammatical cooperate with tense to conceptualize grounding; in lexical aspect, one can analyze the event through the two modes of scanning (summary, sequential), while, grammatical aspect cannot be separated from tense due to the fact that there is a marker involved.As for whether Langacker's cognitive mode of scanning is sufficient for the analysis of the English verbs' grammatical behaviours, it appears, from the analysis of the mentioned sentences, that the mode of scanning can provide a sufficient analysis of English aspect.