Aspectual verbs, like begin, start, continue, finish, and end, have been shown in recent literature to participate in several linguistic phenomena, resulting in a complex array of theoretical puzzles. The majority of semantic inquiry into these verbs revolves around their transitive constructions, focusing on the compositional relationship between the aspectual verb and its semantic complement. Many previous accounts, which rely on processes like complement coercion, type-shifting, and lexical metonymy to explain specific verbal behaviors, assume that aspectual verbs are type-specific in their semantic selection of complements, only ever taking an event argument. However, Piñango and Deo (2016) introduce the first of many behavioral complexities exhibited by these verbs in their novel observations of their varied stative (non-eventive) interpretations, reflecting their underlying mereological nature. Based on this, their account, the Structured Individual Hypothesis (SIH), in essence, dissolves the event/entity type distinction held by previous researchers and assumes instead a type-flexible account for aspectual verb semantic composition. However, while the mereological framework assumed in the SIH can be considered fundamental to aspectual verb semantics across complement types, the set of novel empirical evidence put forth in this dissertation shows that neither the SIH nor any current theory is sufficient for a comprehensive theory of all aspectual verb behaviors. As these theories limit their scope to primarily transitive aspectual verb structures, they miss generalizations evident when considering the varied argument structures these verbs may appear in (including z began x, x began, x began with y, and z began x with y). Specifically, the novel data of aspectual verb selective transitivity alternations presented here, which indicates their underlying (anti-)causative nature, crucially challenges the generality of the SIH, in particular, as it provides significant support for the event/entity type distinction in aspectual verb composition. The linking of prior (anti-)causation accounts to aspectual verb behavior aids in motivating a monadic approach to their semantic argument structure, which assumes they take in a single argument in their base form. Furthermore, previous accounts suffer from a lack of the fine-grained semantic formalism necessary to account for the varied telicity and meanings exhibited across these verbs. As such, this dissertation has five main goals: (1) to provide a comprehensive review of prior accounts, (2) to examine the theoretical challenges to each in light of novel empirical data, (3) to link aspectual verb behavior to a monadic non-derivational non-lexical (anti-)causation account, (4) to investigate possible expansions of each prior account, and (5) to propose a set of theoretically well-motivated formal components that are argued to be necessary to incorporate in a comprehensive aspectual verb theory.
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