User:Krasimir Kabakciev/Henk Verkuyl

Henk J. Verkuyl (4 June 1938) is a Dutch professor.

He is emeritus professor of linguistics at Utrecht University. His main contributions are in the field of aspect semantics. He has also conducted extensive research in the field of lexicography and lexical semantics. Verkuyl is still active in linguistics, publishing contributions in the field of semantic research.

Compositional aspect theory
Verkuyl's most influential contribution is the so-called plus principle, which is a treatment of aspect in compositional terms. Aspect covers a phenomenon in which some sentences in language express bounded situations with a reached telos, while other sentences do not. For example, the sentence John has read a book means that John has finished reading that book. While Jan was walking through the park only implies that Jan was walking through the park and he could still be walking through the park, the sentence says nothing more about that. The first type of sentences is called perfective, the second imperfective.

Traditionally, aspect, just like Aktionsarten from Slavic theory, was seen as a property of the verb. This is mainly because in Slavic languages ​​verbs have two forms, a perfective and an imperfective one. In his dissertation, Verkuyl showed that this is not true, but that the aspectual value of a sentence depends on three parts of the sentence: the subject, the verb and the direct object. Only if all three are of the right type is the sentence perfective:


 * Jan ate an apple - perfective
 * Jan carried an apple - not perfective, because the verb is not of the correct type
 * Jan ate apples - not perfective, because the direct object does not express a specified (bounded) quantity
 * Children eat an apple - not perfective because the subject expresses unspecified (non-bounded) quantity

This insight into the compositional nature of aspect is still a crucial theme in aspectology, although many refinements and changes have been made.

Main publications

 * On the Compositional Nature of the Aspects, 1971 dissertation at Utrecht University
 * Logica, taal en betekenis - deel I en II. Published in 1982 under the pseudonym Gamut together with Johan van Benthem, Jeroen Groenendijk, Dick de Jongh en Martin Stokhof
 * Cryptogrammatica, a help guide to creating cryptograms, published in 1988.
 * A Theory of Aspectuality. The Interaction between Temporal and Atemporal Structure. Published in 1993 by Cambridge University Press.
 * Binary tense. Published in 2008 by CSLI Publications, Stanford.
 * The Compositional Nature of Tense, Mood and Aspect. Published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press.
 * On Verkuyl. Krasimir Kabakčiev. After Verkuyl’s discovery aspect is no longer a mystery, but aspectology needs a reform. Review article: Henk Verkuyl, The Compositional Nature of Tense, Mood and Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Athens Journal of Philology 10(3), 2023, pp. 247-274.

Trivia
Under the pseudonym Dr Verschuyl or H.J. Verschuyl Verkuyl published some puzzle dictionaries and puzzle encyclopedias