Request Correction

Aspect Variability and the Annotation of Aspect in the IMAGACT Ontology of Action

This paper highlights some theoretical and quantitative issues related to the representation and annotation of aspectual meaning in the IMAGACT corpus-based multimodal ontology of action. Given the multimodal nature of this ontology, in which actions are represented through both prototypical visual scenes and linguistic captions, the annotation of aspect in this resource allows us to draw some important considerations about the relation between aspectual meaning and eventualities. The annotation procedure is reported and quantitative data show that, both in the English and Italian corpora, many verbs present aspectual variation, and many eventualities can be represented by locally equivalent verbs with different aspect. The reason why verb aspectual class may vary is investigated. Our analysis makes once more evident that verbs may vary their aspectual properties with respect not only to their argument structure but, more precisely, to the inner qualities of the eventualities they express. Crucially, when eventualities are expressed by equivalent verbs with different aspectual properties, the verbs put on focus different parts of the structure of the eventuality.