Complementation has received a great deal of attention in the past
fifteen to twenty years; various approcahes have been used to study it
and different groups of complement-taking verbs have been examined. The
approach taken here employs analytic techniques which have not been
systematically applied before to this group of temporal aspectual verbs.
In other works which have concentrated on these same verbs (perlmutter,
1968, 1970 and Newmeyer, 1969a, 1969b) few insights about the semantic
properties of the verbs are formalized. In the present study, the
various verbs and their complement structures as they appear in surface
forms are considered for their associated presuppositions and
consequences (entailments). The notions of presup- position and
consequence are defmed and used so as to take conversational interaction
into consideration. This adds considerably to the information that can
be obtained about the verbs in question. Furthermore, the analysis of
these temporal aspectual verbs leads to a description of their
complement structures in terms of 'events', a semantic category found to
appropriately characterize the quality of most of these structures. In
this analysis, events are described as consisting of several different
temporal segments; thus the sentences contained in the complements of
these verbs are described as naming events, each containing one or more
of several possible temporal segments. The aspectualizers in tum, act as
referentials, each referring to one or another of the event-segments
named in their complements.
