Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

I describe an implemented computational model of verbal aspect that supports the proposition that the semantics of aspect is grounded in sensory-motor primitives. In this theory, aspectual expressions refer to schematized piocesses that recur in sensory-motor control (such as goal, periodicity, iteration, final state, duration, and parameters such as force and effort). This active model of aspect grounded in sensory-motor primitives is able to model cross-linguistic variation in aspectual expressions while avoiding some paradoxes and problems in model-theoretic and other traditional accounts.