Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes results of a dynamic model of aspectual composition that demonstrates how features necessary for planning and controlling actions can also motivate and ground simple analyses of a number of aspectual phenomena. A novel feature of the model is an active computational representation for verb semantics called x-schemas, an extension of the Petri net formalism that can encode goals, resources and other features affecting aspect. Vexing problems of aspectual composition lend themselves to simple analyses in terms of the context-sensitive interaction between verb-specific x-schemas and a controller x-schema that captures important regularities in the evolution of events. The resulting x-schemas can be elaborated and constrained by such factors as tense, temporal modifiers, nominals and pragmatic context, providing a rich representation that supports simulative inference in language understanding.