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Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems
... Long & Sato 1984;Schwartz & Sprouse 1994Ringböm 2007). The L2 acquisition of aspect -the grammatical property determining the internal temporal structure of an event (Comrie 1976;Chung & Timberlake 1985;Smith 1991Smith , 1997) -is well-suited for investigations into the impact of L1 influence in L2A, as it is demonstrated to be susceptible to variable L1 influence depending on the L1 in question (e.g. Slabakova ...
... Given that the progressive is the only imperfective meaning to have a dedicated morpheme (-ing) -as discussed, the -ed marker associated with the Simple Past form is not dedicated to the imperfective as it also expresses perfectivity -this infers that the main aspectual contrast made in English is between the perfective and the progressive, as opposed to languages such as French and Spanish which contrast a form solely used for the perfective with one spanning all three imperfective interpretations (Comrie 1976;Smith 1997;Kihlstedt 2002;Arche 2006Arche , 2014Labeau 2011 This attests strongly to the notion that for English speakers, the SP is not only a marker of perfectivity, but also of (imperfective) habituality Arche 2014). In addition to the SP's use to convey habituality (Example 17), it is also used in English to express continuousness (Example 18): this final imperfective interpretation is the sole expressed by the Simple Past alone. ...
... Though it is a language universal based on essentially invariant semantic primitives (Comrie 1976;Chung & Timberlake 1985;Bertinetto 1997Bertinetto , 2001Smith 1991Smith , 1997Smith , 2006, the manner in which aspect is expressed demonstrates notable crosslinguistic variation (e.g. Comrie 1976;Smith 1991, Verkuyl et al 2005. ...
This thesis centres on the second language (L2) development of viewpoint aspect, a grammatical property definable as the contrast between perfective viewpoint, which indicates a completed eventuality, and imperfective viewpoint, which provides an ongoing or non-complete perspective (Smith 1991, 1997). This property is well-established as challenging to acquire in an L2 for native (L1) speakers of English, due to the limited grammaticalisation of viewpoint aspect in English (Montrul & Slabakova 2002, 2003; McManus 2015). Yet studies examining L2 viewpoint aspectual development in L1 English speakers (e.g. Domínguez et al. 2011, 2017) do not always find that their results align consistently with L1 influence (frequently operationalised using the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2003, 2005, 2008, 2009), a seminal generative framework). This project analyses the production and comprehension of L2 French viewpoint aspectual form-meaning mappings in n = 43 L1 English university-level learners of French, studied cross-sectionally prior to and following a “year abroad” in a French-speaking country. This L2 data is combined with a frequency-distributional analysis of L1 French from two sources: experimental production data and a >10,000-word corpus sample, the latter sourced from the freely available CFPP2000 (http://cfpp2000.univparis3.fr/index.html). The aim is to assess the extent to which both Feature Reassembly predictions and frequency distributional information from the input can respectively explain trajectories of L2 viewpoint aspectual development, and consequently evaluate whether an approach which unites generative and input-based principles can usefully contribute to our understanding of L2 acquisition as a whole. It is found that learners are indeed sensitive to frequency-distributional information – as is reflected in their production of French aspectual forms – and suggest that they are also sensitive to input changes, as shown by the unexpected lower production accuracy of the post-year abroad group. In conclusion, it appears that an approach which integrates both Feature Reassembly and input information may provide a more comprehensive picture of L2 (aspectual) development. Keywords: L2 French, L1 English, viewpoint aspect, imperfect, input, feature reassembly, study abroad, corpus analysis
... Aspecto, de acordo com Comrie (1976), diz respeito às diferentes maneiras de se visualizar a constituição temporal interna de uma situação. O aspecto investigado neste estudo é o perfect, aspecto gramatical que pode ser definido, segundo Pancheva (2003), como um intervalo de tempo, conhecido como perfect time span (PTS), ou intervalo de tempo de Quanto às realizações morfossintáticas do aspecto perfect associado ao passado no português do Brasil (PB), Sant'Anna (2019) realizou um estudo piloto sobre as morfologias que veiculam PU e PE a partir de dados de fala espontânea. ...
... Segundo Comrie (1985), a categoria linguística de tempo, chamada tense, possibilita a localização de situações em relação a determinados pontos de referência, como, por exemplo, o momento da fala. Em contrapartida, a categoria linguística de aspecto possibilita as diferentes maneiras de se fazer referência à constituição temporal interna de uma situação (COMRIE, 1976). ...
... Ainda segundo Comrie (1976), aspecto pode ser dividido em dois tipos: gramatical 1 e semântico 2 . O aspecto gramatical pode ser expresso pelos elementos gramaticais que compõem a sentença, como auxiliares e afixos 3 . ...
O objetivo deste trabalho é o de investigar as realizações linguísticas do aspecto perfect
associado ao passado no português do Brasil (PB). Para tanto, formularam-se as seguintes
hipóteses: (i) o perfect universal (PU) associado ao tempo passado no PB é realizado
morfologicamente apenas por meio do verbo principal conjugado no pretérito imperfeito; (ii)
o perfect resultativo (PRes) associado ao passado no PB é realizado morfologicamente apenas
pelo pretérito mais-que-perfeito composto com auxiliar “ter”; e (iii) o perfect experiencial
(PEx) associado ao passado no PB é realizado morfologicamente apenas pelo pretérito mais-
que-perfeito composto com auxiliar “ter”. Para a investigação, foram analisadas cinco horas
de fala espontânea de um corpus em desenvolvimento e foram desenvolvidos e aplicados dois
testes linguísticos. Considerando-se os dados obtidos na fala espontânea e nos testes
linguísticos, na realização de PU, as morfologias identificadas foram pretérito imperfeito e
“estar” no pretérito imperfeito + gerúndio, enquanto, na realização de PRes, as morfologias de
pretérito mais-que-perfeito composto (com auxiliares “ter” e “haver”), pretérito perfeito,
pretérito mais-que-perfeito simples e “acabar” no pretérito mais-que-perfeito composto com
auxiliar “ter” + preposição “de” + infinitivo, e, na realização de PEx, as morfologias de
pretérito mais-que-perfeito composto (com auxiliares “ter” e “haver”), pretérito perfeito e
pretérito mais-que-perfeito simples. Discutiu-se que os dados deste trabalho, por apontarem
diferentes realizações morfossintáticas entre os três tipos de perfect, fornecem evidências para
a proposta de Rodrigues e Martins (2019) de existência de três sintagmas de perfect na
representação sintática da sentença: um para o PU, um para o PRes e um para o PEx.
... Aktionsart pode ser definido como diferentes tipos de situações inerentes aos itens que compõem uma sentença (COMRIE, 1976). Vendler (1967), ao analisar os predicados verbais em língua inglesa, propõe uma classificação de quatros tipos de verbos nessa língua, a saber: ações, estados, processos culminados e culminações. ...
... Kiss Katalin (2011) argumenta ainda que, embora verbos semelfactivos não possam ocorrer normalmente atrelados ao aspecto imperfectivo, que salienta as diferentes fases internas de um evento (COMRIE, 1976), e em conjunção com advérbios celerativos, como rapidly ("rapidamente") e slowly ("vagarosamente"), quando há emprego nesses contextos, tais verbos marginalmente licenciam apenas a leitura de incoação, como em John slowly coughed ("João vagarosamente tossia"). Verbos de achievement, por outro lado, admitem, normalmente, uma leitura celerativa, que indica a velocidade de acontecimentos do evento e não sua fase inicial necessariamente. ...
... A noção aspectual de iteratividade é tradicionalmente compreendida como aquela que traduz uma repetição de um evento. Comrie (1976), ao definir o que se chama de aspecto gramatical como as diferentes noções aspectuais que podem ser veiculadas por meio de morfologia verbal, divide-o em dois subtipos: o perfectivo e o imperfectivo. Enquanto este refere-se à noção aspectual que salienta as diferentes fases internas de um evento, aquele pode ser definido como a noção aspectual que permite a visualização de um evento como um todo indivisível. ...
O presente trabalho adota os pressupostos da Morfologia Distribuída (HALLE & MARANTZ, 1993; MARANTZ, 1997; HARLEY & NOYER, 1999; EMBICK, 2000) referentes à inserção tardia de itens vocabulares, à subespecificação de expressões fonológicas quanto às posições sintáticas e ao acesso da hierarquia e de processos sintáticos ao “léxico” na derivação. Adota-se, também, o pressuposto referente à existência de restrições aspectuais por parte de raízes na adjunção a certos morfemas categorizadores (OLIVEIRA, 2008). O objetivo geral deste trabalho é contribuir para a descrição da iteratividade nas línguas naturais. Os objetivos específicos são: a) averiguar a pertinência da postulação (CUNHA & CINTRA, 2013) de uma especialização frequentativa aos sufixos “-icar”, “-itar”, “-ilhar”, “-inhar” e “-iscar” e b) investigar os contextos de ocorrência de tais sufixos no português do Brasil. As hipóteses deste trabalho são: a) os sufixos sob análise são especificados para o traço [+iterativo] e b) há restrições aspectuais quanto ao aktionsartda raiz adjungida a tais sufixos. Os dados analisados foram retirados de dicionários e foram expostos informalmente a julgamentos de aceitabilidade por falantes nativos. Os resultados deste trabalho sugerem que tais sufixos são especificados para o traço de iteratividade. Além disso, há restrições quanto ao aktionsartdas raízes, de forma que raízes télicas (achievemente accomplishments) prototipicamente se combinam com tais sufixos.
... In contrast, atelic events are viewed as a process for which we do not construe boundaries (onset and offset) 4 . In 'in-progress' actions, people direct their attention toward the internal view of an event, highlight 'intermediate phases', and they focus less on the result of the action itself (e.g., Comrie, 1976;Dahl, 2000). ...
... This suggests that the mass-reading quality of bare objects leads people to view the action as 'in-progress'. As described in Section 4 (Klein, 1994;Comrie, 1976;Dahl, 2000), in 'in-progression' actions, an internal time span is focused within the total event time. If people view an event as 'in-progression', they direct their Our results also accord with earlier studies on the influence of linguistic input that suggest even a very subtle difference in our choices among syntactic alternations can lead to different event conceptualizations (Johnson & Goldberg, 2012;Snedeker, 2013, Sakarias andFlecken, 2019;Stutterheim et al., 2012). ...
How does the mass versus count reading of object nouns in event description contribute to interpreting the temporal features of events? Numerous semantic studies have suggested a homomorphic relation between the quantificational features of nominals and the telicity reading of verbal expressions. They argue that a count-reading object noun renders the verb telic, whereas a mass-reading noun triggers an atelic interpretation of the verb. In this study, we evaluated this claim across one experiment on Persian. Indefinite bare direct objects in Persian are unspecified for number and therefore have a mass-reading potential; we contrast them with indefinite number-specified direct objects (count-reading objects). We hypothesized that people would represent the events, including bare objects in their sentence description, as in-progress. In contrast, they construct a representation of events having been completed when non-bare objects describe the events. The findings support the hypothesis. Overall, the results demonstrated that encoded semantic features like boundedness influence the temporal representation of events. We further used the data from this study to evaluate two contradictory views in syntactic studies of direct objects in Persian. One view suggests a binary classification of direct objects, the other considers the difference between object types as a matter of cline rather than binary opposition. Our results support the second view by showing that the two object types do not behave the same in regard to the telicity reading.
... verb forms. Aspect is often discussed in terms of aspectual pairings in Ukrainian literature on the topic (Vyxovanec', Horodens'ka 2004;Pljušč 2005), and Slavic in general (Jakobson 1971;Timberlake 1975;Comrie 1976;Dahl 1985). This distinction will become relevant in this essay as well. ...
... The Ukrainian aspect typically does not pertain to the internal structure of events composed of each other and in combination with the properties of internal arguments (e.g., van Hout 2000), but to the viewpoint on the situation or event. The viewpoint is taken either from the outside (on the event or a situation as a whole) or from the inside (from the internal course of the event or situation), as described, for instance, in Comrie 1976, Dahl 1984and 1985, and Smith 1991 In sum, we do not expect the properties of the object to influence the aspectual semantics in a clause. There is one more type of verbs, those that can express both perfective and imperfective meaning. ...
p>The volume collects contributions that were presented at the PARTE workshop in Budapest in September 2022 or at the Partitive Online Talks, with the goal of investigating the universal and varying properties of partitive constructions and partitive elements. Since the expression of partitivity in Romance languages has been studied extensively, in this volume special attention is paid to other European languages, such as Germanic, Gaelic, Finno-Ugric and Slavic languages. With data from microvariation and variation that spans over vast geographical distances and involves various contact situations, this volume brings new insights into what is universal and what is particular in partitive constructions and elements in Europe.</p
... verb forms. Aspect is often discussed in terms of aspectual pairings in Ukrainian literature on the topic (Vyxovanec', Horodens'ka 2004;Pljušč 2005), and Slavic in general (Jakobson 1971;Timberlake 1975;Comrie 1976;Dahl 1985). This distinction will become relevant in this essay as well. ...
... The Ukrainian aspect typically does not pertain to the internal structure of events composed of each other and in combination with the properties of internal arguments (e.g., van Hout 2000), but to the viewpoint on the situation or event. The viewpoint is taken either from the outside (on the event or a situation as a whole) or from the inside (from the internal course of the event or situation), as described, for instance, in Comrie 1976, Dahl 1984, and Smith 1991 In sum, we do not expect the properties of the object to influence the aspectual semantics in a clause. There is one more type of verbs, those that can express both perfective and imperfective meaning. ...
p>The volume collects contributions that were presented at the PARTE workshop in Budapest in September 2022 or at the Partitive Online Talks, with the goal of investigating the universal and varying properties of partitive constructions and partitive elements. Since the expression of partitivity in Romance languages has been studied extensively, in this volume special attention is paid to other European languages, such as Germanic, Gaelic, Finno-Ugric and Slavic languages. With data from microvariation and variation that spans over vast geographical distances and involves various contact situations, this volume brings new insights into what is universal and what is particular in partitive constructions and elements in Europe.</p
... 3 Para este trabalho, como para Comrie (1976), a morfologia progressiva a que se faz menção é aquela constituída, no inglês, pelo verbo to be (ser ou estar) conjugado, pelo verbo principal e pelo sufixo ing. ...
... (3) e (4), adotando a perspectiva de Comrie (1976), há exemplos, respectivamente, de veiculação de: aspecto perfectivo, aspecto imperfectivo habitual, aspecto imperfectivo contínuo progressivo e aspecto imperfectivo não progressivo. ...
... 3 Para este trabalho, como para Comrie (1976), a morfologia progressiva a que se faz menção é aquela constituída, no inglês, pelo verbo to be (ser ou estar) conjugado, pelo verbo principal e pelo sufixo ing. ...
... (3) e (4), adotando a perspectiva de Comrie (1976), há exemplos, respectivamente, de veiculação de: aspecto perfectivo, aspecto imperfectivo habitual, aspecto imperfectivo contínuo progressivo e aspecto imperfectivo não progressivo. ...
Este trabalho adota os pressupostos de Smith (1991) e de Kiss Katalin (2011) referentes à assunção de que verbos semelfactivos são especificados negativamente para os traços de estatividade, duratividade e telicidade. Tais autoras também argumentam que verbos semelfactivos marginalmente ocorrem com morfologia progressiva (ing) e, quando o ocorrem, em inglês, apenas uma leitura é possível: iteratividade. Frente a isso, o objetivo geral deste trabalho é contribuir para o estudo de classes acionais das línguas naturais. O objetivo específico é investigar as diferentes leituras advindas do emprego da morfologia progressiva (verbo to be + verbo lexical + sufixo -ing) associada ao tempo presente em verbos semelfactivos em inglês. A metodologia empregada consiste na aplicação remota de um “teste de paráfrases” (ALVES, 2019) a vinte falantes nativos de inglês, em que tais falantes identificaram as possíveis paráfrases para sentenças com verbos semelfactivos em inglês com morfologia progressiva. A hipótese é de que, em sentenças com verbos semelfactivos em inglês com morfologia progressiva, apenas a leitura de iteratividade pode ser disparada (SMITH, 1991; KISS KATALIN, 2011). A previsão experimental é de que os participantes escolherão, apenas, a paráfrase referente à leitura de iteratividade. Os resultados apontam que há outras leituras possíveis para tal combinação, a saber: leitura de habitualidade, continuidade, incoação e prospecção. Sendo assim, a hipótese inicialmente postulada foi refutada.
... It is used to refer to the perfective-imperfective distinction expressed by inflectional morphemes on the verb (as in Romance languages, for example) or by special function morphemes within a verbal complex (as in the English progressive construction, for example). Such formal devices are often covered by the term 'grammatical aspect* (de Swart, 1998, for example) and contrasted with semantic categories that belong to '(inherent) lexical aspect* (Comrie, 1976;Van Valin, 1990), 'aspectual class* (Dowty, 1979) or 'aspect* (Tenny, 1987(Tenny, , 1994, all of which are used for the classification into states, activities, accomplishments and achievements (indroduced by Vendler, 1957), and the superordinate telic-atelic distinction (introduced by Garey, 1957). The latter view of aspect originated in the classification of verb meanings in the philosophy of action (cf. ...
... Hence, the English progressive is characterized in terms of the proper part relation '<'. Moreover, the English progressive requires that predicates and sentences in its scope be episodic, denote some 'temporary' or 'contingent' property (see Comrie, 1976;Carlson, 1977;Dowty, 1979;Bach, 1981;Timberlake, 1982;Smith, 1985). The Slavic imperfective operator can be freely applied to stative predicates. ...
... Predicates that, combined with a time-frame adverbial, only have the inclusive interpretation (i.e., the event time is properly included in the reference time) are perfective, whereas others are imperfective, as illustrated in (2) from Łazorczyk (2010, 55). Another prominent line of analysis of grammatical aspect (with special emphasis on Slavic languages) is based on partitivity (e.g., Comrie, 1976;Smith, 1997;Filip, 1993Filip, , 2017Altshuler, 2013Altshuler, , 2014. A classical definition, often assumed in the Slavic literature, is that by Comrie (1976, 16), for whom "perfectivity indicates the view of a situation as a single whole, without distinction of the various separate phases that make up that situation; while the imperfective pays essential attention to the internal structure of the situation". ...
We argue that secondary imperfectivisation in Serbo-Croatian (and possibly in Slavic more generally) is a procedure whereby a new verb is derived from a perfective verb, i.e., the perfective verb gets reverbalised. This operation takes a perfective verb, that is, a verbal structure including an aspectual projection that restricts its interpretation aspectually (but also adds some lexical semantic content) and turns it into a bare vP. The new verb preserves the conceptually enriched semantics, but not the structurally derived aspectual restriction, which gets overwritten by the newly projected category. The inner aspect of the verb is thus reset to the unvalued, i.e., aspectually unrestricted default. The verb gets interpreted as imperfective by scalar implicature: had the speaker intended the perfective interpretation, they would have used the more specific and computationally cheaper expression involving the perfective verb. On the morphophonological side, assuming with a host of literature that the verbal category is realised by theme vowels (Spyropoulos et al., 2015 and Panagiotidis et al., 2017 for Greek, Svenonius, 2004a for Russian, Jabłońska, 2004, 2007 for Polish, Biskup, 2019 for Czech, Milosavljević & Arsenijević, 2022 for Serbo-Croatian), imperfectivisation amounts to stacking theme vowels. Support for the view comes from Simonović et al. (2023), who arrive at the same conclusion on morphophonological grounds.
... 2 La diferencia entre aspecto progresivo y aspecto continuo (siendo los dos considerados imperfectivos , Bertinetto 1986;Camus 2004;García Fernández 2006;Mair 2012) ha sido controversial en la literatura sobre aspecto en lenguas Romances (Mair 2012). Para algunos autores, el progresivo y el continuo difieren únicamente en que el aspecto progresivo está reservado a predicados dinámicos, mientras que el continuo no (Comrie 1976;Mair 2012). Para otros autores, ambos aspectos constituyen dos dominios separados (García Fernández 2006). ...
En este artículo analizamos un uso peculiar de la perífrasis ir + gerundio, que denominamos lectura de evento concluido, presente en el español rioplatense, que se diferencia de la lectura canónica de ir + gerundio en que parece expresar una situación en la que el evento denotado por el predicado se presenta como completo (De todo lo que tenía para leer, Ana iba leyendo tres libros el miércoles → ley. tres libros). A través de una serie de pruebas, demostramos que esta construcción constituye una estructura progresiva, a diferencia de la forma canónica, que expresa una estructura durativa. En concreto, sostenemos que este uso de la perífrasis ir + gerundio describe una situación en la cual, en un punto temporal específico (el tiempo de referencia), ciertos eventos ya han ocurrido, y se espera que otros eventos potenciales ocurran. Así, el efecto de perfectividad surge del anclaje temporal de la estructura progresiva: los eventos denotados por el predicado son anteriores al tiempo de referencia. La interpretación prospectiva, a su vez, se deriva pragmáticamente de una implicatura escalar.
... Languages vary synchronically in the ways they encode conceptual categories such as tense, aspect and modality (i.a., Comrie 1976;Bybee et al. 1994;Bhat 1999;Binnick 2012). Major axes of variation are the degrees of obligatoriness and systematicity of expression. ...
Languages differ in how systematically and obligatorily they encode conceptual categories such as tense and aspect. By drawing on large parallel corpora, these differences can be exploited heuristically: expressive obligatoriness and the systematicity of a conceptual category in one language can function as a probe for other languages that do not (evidently) encode it. This study applies this method—called heuristic translation mining (HTM)—to viewpoint aspect in Mandarin (an aspect-oriented language) and Dutch (a non-aspect-oriented language). Specifically, it takes the Mandarin aspect markers 起来-qilai (“ingressive”) and 下去-xiaqu (“continuative”) and collects translation strategies for these markers from a corpus of five Mandarin novels and their Dutch translations. The outcomes are methodological, descriptive and theoretical in nature. Methodologically, it is shown how conceptual templates consisting of temporal boundaries and phases facilitate annotating specific types of viewpoint aspect consistently. Descriptively, the exercise indicates at which linguistic levels viewpoint aspect may be encoded in a non-aspect-oriented language. Theoretically, conducting an HTM analysis with several aspect markers at once makes it possible to quantify (non-)marking of conceptual content; it turns out that the types of viewpoint under study correspond to varying marking frequencies, which may correlate with conceptual complexity.
... The first is the inherent temporal properties of the events themselves: this determines their lexical aspect. Specifically, events can differ according to whether or not they have: (a) a specific endpoint (telic events) or no inherent endpoint (atelic events) (Comrie, 1976;Dowty, 1979); (b) duration (durative events) or not (punctual events) (Vendler, 1967); and (c) require a continual effort to be maintained or not (Vendler, 1967). Vendler (1967) classified events on the basis of these properties resulting in four categories of lexical aspect: states, achievements, accomplishments and activities. ...
We examined the influence of the lexical and grammatical aspect of events on pronoun resolution in adults (18 to 23 years, N = 46), adolescents (13 to 14 years, N=66) and children (7 to 11 years, N=192). Participants were presented with 64 two-sentence stimuli: the first sentence described events with two same gender protagonists; the second began with a personal pronoun and described a status that could be attributed to either protagonist. Participants recorded to whom the pronoun referred, in a booklet. For all groups, Subject resolutions were more likely for events (a) without endpoints relative to those with endpoints, and (b) described as ongoing rather than completed, but this latter influence was restricted to events with endpoints for adults and adolescents. The findings provide support for the Event Structure Hypothesis of pronoun resolution (Rohde, Kehler & Elman, 2006) and provide new insights into the development of pronoun resolution.
... The PERFECTIVE here probably signals that the event has a starting point and an ending point, suggesting it is no longer ongoing -whereas the NOMINALIZER adds HABITUAL aspect. This seems like a contradiction to what Comrie (1976) 'When they would sound the drums over there, the professors would teach us through the radio.' [SHGS2013_09_06SS1_Mother_Tales_1426890] This example shows that there are clear formal distinctions between this type of construction and a simple NOMINALIZATION and both can be used in tandem. ...
... Tense refers to the external temporal structure of an event, (i.e. locating the situations in time, usually with reference to the present time) (Comrie, 1976;Smith, 1997). Viewpoint aspect refers to the internal temporal constituency of a situation, expressing information about the temporal development of an eventuality, for instance, whether the event is in progress, finished or about to start, and about the number of occasions of each eventuality (Arche, 2006(Arche, , 2014Comrie, 1976, Demirdache andUribe-Exebarria, 2000;Klein, 2009;Smith, 1991). ...
The thesis examines the L2 learnability of features at the syntax-semantics interface. In the present thesis, L2 learnability problems are approached by following the predictions of the Feature Reassembly (FR) (Lardiere, 2007, 2008, 2009a, b), which assumes that L2 learning tasks lie in mapping existing features onto new L2 lexical items with different configurations. Previous studies testing the predictions of the FR reveal that the FR provides testable hypotheses for the learning task faced by the learners. However, what remains less known is which type of feature reassembly is more difficult for acquisition. The thesis provides novel insight into the nature of the L2 learning task and explores what factors affect the extent of L1 transfer and the complexity of the learning task at the initial stages of feature reassembly by exploring the L2 acquisition of viewpoint aspect.
Viewpoint aspect is a semantic category that has syntactic representations (Arche, 2006, 2014; Comrie, 1976, Demirdache and Uribe-Exebarria, 2000; Klein, 2009; Smith, 1991). The way aspectual meanings are realized is prone to cross-linguistic variation. L2 learnability of viewpoint aspect has been widely tested (e.g. Domínguez et al., 2013, 2017; Duff and Li, 2002; Jin, 2009; McManus, 2015; Montrul and Slabakova, 2002, 2003; Roberts and Liszka, 2013; Slabakova and Montrul, 2002,2003). However, what remains unclear is what are strong predictors of the acquisition problems faced by the learners: for instance, whether the grammaticalization of aspectual distinctions or the transparency of form-meaning mapping of the aspectual features determines the complexity of the learning task. The current thesis contributes to the knowledge of the nature of the L2 learnability of viewpoint aspect by investigating the Chinese—Spanish language combination. These two languages are typologically different, but both of them grammaticalize perfective/imperfective aspectual distinctions. A bidirectional study was conducted among 75 instructed L1 Spanish-L2 Chinese learners and 81 instructed L1 Chinese-L2 Spanish learners. A Sentence-Context-Preference-Matching task test whether learners have assigned correct semantic contrast to aspectual forms, and a Fill-in-the-blanks task test learners’ use of the aspectual forms.
... Two aspects are recognised by Comrie (1976), the imperfective and the perfective aspect. The imperfective which is otherwise known as the progressive denotes an action that is yet to be completed. ...
... Though there are different definitions of pluractionality, most involve in some way repetition of an event. A verb can contain by its very definition the idea of repetition, sometimes called a semelfactive verb (Comrie 1976), like knock or blink. But this understanding can extend beyond semelfactives to words like walk, which presumably is a kind of repetition of a sequence of steps. ...
This paper presents an overview of plurals and pluractionals in Nuuchahnulth. A full account of meanings and morphological strategies is given, including lists of which lexemes take which formatives. Finally, there is a brief investigation into the development of plural morphology in the family, in which the Nuuchahnulth formatives are compared to others in the Wakashan family.
... The two most canonical meanings of the imperfective are the progressive one and the plural event reading, commonly described as iterative. The following description is based on Wierzbicka (1967), Comrie (1976), Filip (1999), Smith (1997), Willim (2006), and Borik (2006. ...
Earlier research showed that the progressive aspect in Dutch extends duration estimations for short events and shortens the perception of inherently medium and long events. In the study reported here, we conducted an experiment examining whether the same effect can be observed in Polish, a language with a morphologically realised perfective vs. imperfective distinction. We confronted two views on grammatical aspect. The first one postulates that English simple past tense verbs of telic predicates introduce a silent PERF operator and that the Polish imperfective is equivalent to the English progressive. According to the second view, there is no PERF operator in simple past clauses in Dutch (and by analogy also in English), while perfective eventualities in Polish should be perceived as shorter than imperfective events which view the event from the inside without imposing any boundaries on its runtime. The results of this study show that the second view is more plausible, suggesting that languages vary in the interpretation of event duration depending on whether they have a clear grammatical aspect or whether such distinctions are less articulated.
(Journal Beiträge zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft / Contributions to General and Comparative Linguistics (ISSN: 2299-4122)
... The literature mostly distinguishes three categorizations of aspect: lexical aspect (situation/Aktionsart) is a semantic property inherent in the meaning of the verb (e.g., the lexical aspect of activities, accomplishments, achievements) and refers to the internal temporal constituency of events (see Vendler, 1967), grammatical (viewpoint) aspect is morphologically encoded with distinct aspectual marking (Comrie, 1976), and compositional (VP) aspect which refers to the relation of the verb with other elements in the verb phrase (Verkuyl, 1972). Greek verbs are morphologically marked for aspect, tense, person, number, and voice. ...
This study tests grammatical aspect in adult Heritage Speakers (HSs) of Greek in Germany (HSs-Germany) and the US (HSs-US), a topic which has not been investigated before for this language, exploring the role of the dominant language and the default value as an acquisition strategy. In an oral elicitation task (Experiment 1) targeting the production of aspectual marking in Greek, Greek monolinguals (MSs) and HSs-Germany exhibited ceiling performance, while HSs-US were significantly less accurate. Education in Greek reliably predicted their accuracy. In a speeded Grammaticality Judgment task (Experiment 2) targeting the comprehension of aspect in a Grammaticality x Aspect repeated measures design, similar results were obtained for the grammatical conditions as in Experiment 1. In ungrammatical conditions, accuracy on aspect was affected for all groups, and this was more evident for HSs. HSs-US were overall less accurate with the morphologically marked form (perfective). Decision Times (DTs) revealed that only MSs and HSs-Germany were sensitive to aspect violations exhibiting longer DTs. Education in Greek reliably predicted accuracy and DTs. The results are discussed within the realm of heritage languages, language contact, and aspect acquisition in Greek bilingual populations. Finally, certain novel verbal forms produced by HSs are also discussed.
... The newly published textbook for Latvian written in Latvian for the A2 level introduces the notion of aspectual opposition in the framework of "Grammar" using the aspectual pairs pirkt / nopirkt 'buy (ipf./pf.)', maksāt / samaksāt 'pay (ipf./pf.)' and others (Auziņa, Berķe, Lazareva, Šalme 2016, 36, 80, 84, 122, 138), while the prefixal derivation on the basis of spatial semantics is introduced in the "Lexicon" categories, as shown in the content of the textbook for the B1 level (Auziņa, Berķe, Lazareva, Šalme, Vaivade 2019, [4][5]. ...
The article addresses verbal aspect in the acquisition of Latvian as a foreign language. Latvian textbooks both in Latvian and in other languages, as well as Japanese learners’ writings are analysed to explore this topic. The main issue is the use of verbs expressing the aspectual opposition perfective / imperfective, as well as the opposition inchoative / stative, and other Aktionsart prefixed verbs. Verbal aspect in Latvian is an implicit category. It is one of the few categories described in Latvian grammars but less frequently addressed in the textbooks of Latvian as a foreign language. The analysis shows that in the initial stage learners may use mostly imperfective non-prefixed verbs when denoting habitual situations in the present tense. The necessity of perfective prefixed verbs arises in the preterit, when learners describe a concrete, single situation that has taken place in the past. Without knowing the notion of aspectual opposition and corresponding perfective prefixed verbs, learners often use imperfective verbs. A similar situation is observed for the inchoative prefixed verbs, which learners replace with the imperfective stative verbs that they have already acquired. The use of other Aktionsart prefixed verbs seems difficult for learners and requires a higher, “native-like” level of proficiency.
This paper reports on the syntactic and semantic properties of grammaticalized uses of the motion active participle ʤaaj ‘coming’ in Rural Jordanian Arabic (RJA). We show that ʤaaj has undergone grammaticalization, resulting in the emergence of three markers with distinct semantics and syntactic behaviors. In particular, we show that ʤaaj has three functions in RJA: (i) a volitional act marker, signifying a purposive or deliberate action, (ii) a marker of inceptive aspect, indicating the initiation of an action, and (iii) a directive mood marker, encoding imperative mood. From a syntactic perspective, we argue that the three markers occupy distinct functional head positions in the clause in line with Cinque, Guglielmo. (2006). Restructuring and functional heads: The cartography of syntactic structures , Vol. 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The volitional and inceptive ʤaaj respectively head their own functional projections, Volition Phrase and Aspect inceptive Phrase, both located below Tense Phrase. On the other hand, the directive ʤaaj heads an imperative Mood Phrase above Tense Phrase. We support this division by showing that the first two makers exhibit full agreement in phi-features with the thematic subject, whereas the latter does not agree with the subject at all due to its high position above Tense Phrase. The findings of this paper align with the crosslinguistic observation that motion verbs like come can be grammaticalized into varying functional elements (Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Dragomirescu, Adina & Alexandru Nicolae. 2014. The multiple grammaticalization of Romanian veni ‘come’. Focusing on the passive construction. In Maud Devos & Jenneke van der Wal (eds.), Come and go off the beaten grammaticalization path , 69–100. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter; Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Kuteva, Tania, et al. 2019. World lexicon of grammaticalization , 2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Lumien van Klinken, Catherine. 1999. A grammar of the Fehan dialect of Tetun . Canberra: Pacific Linguistics).
In this paper, I provide a reanalysis of Chuj’s tense/aspect system. Carolan argues that Chuj is a tensed language, using data from two markers, ix and ∅, that she analyzes as marking perfective aspect and recent and distant past tense, respectively. Using original data collected via semantic fieldwork methods, I show that these two markers can be used with multiple temporal references, indicating that they encode only aspectual information, not tense. I analyze them as recent and remote perfect markers, marking the relationship and the distance between topic time and event time. These findings show that previous descriptions of tense and aspect in Chuj are insufficient, calling for further study to create a more complete understanding of the semantics of verbal markers. Additionally, it is more likely that Chuj is a tenseless language, but future research should seek to confirm this.
This paper offers a novel analysis to account for the semantics of the adverbial approximator gam3zai6 . New data are presented, illustrating that gam3zai6 should be distinguished from its apparent scalar counterparts such as almost in English and chabuduo ‘almost’ in Mandarin Chinese. Building upon Portner’s (1998) analysis of the progressive in English, we propose a modal analysis of gam3zai6 as a prospective operator which creates an intensional context for the expressed event/state under the scope of prospectivity. We incorporate the temporal indication into the semantics of gam3zai6 , enabling a unified account for the diverse interpretations of gam3zai6 -sentences.
This article confronts a multifunctional grammaticalized form in Mandarin, the preverbal morpheme yǒu (有). Since its appearance in the Chinese mainland around the 1990s, there has been controversy about whether it is an aspect marker or not. In response to this question, we conducted a questionnaire survey to investigate how native Mandarin speakers generally understand sentences with preverbal yǒu . The results not only show that preverbal yǒu can serve as a perfective viewpoint marker that makes the terminal boundary of an event semantically visible, but also provide evidence of its other function as an existential marker. The concrete function of preverbal yǒu (perfective or existential) depends on pragmatic inference based on the temporal properties of a given situation. With this observation, the paper resolves the controversy of which of these two functions actually applies to preverbal yǒu , and integrates this marker into the broader context of pragmatics-based multifunctionality as it is widely found in Sinitic and mainland Southeast Asian languages.
Deixis, Yunancadan alıntı “işaret etmek, işaretlemek, belirtmek, açıklamak” anlamlarına gelen bir sözcüktür. Deixis terimi, Türkçede gösterim terimi olarak yaygınlaşmaktadır. Gösterim, edimbilimin konusudur. Doğal dillerde var olan gösterim, sözlü veya yazılı söylemlerin mevcut olgusudur. Yanı sıra gösterim; ana dil öğrenme, ikinci yabancı dil öğrenme, dillerarası çeviri, konuşma ve iletişim çözümlemeleri, söylem ya da metin çözümlemeleri alanlarında olası anlam belirsizliklerini önlemek, ortadan kaldırmak açısından büyük önem taşır. Bu tür dilsel sorunları en aza indirgemek gösterimin görevidir. İlkin felsefede içerimlik ifadeler/ içerimlikler veya dizinsel ifadeler (indexicals) olarak tartışılagelen bir kavram olan gösterimin dilbilimsel serüveni 19. yüzyılda başlamıştır. Gösterimin felsefî yaklaşımlardan ayrışması sonucu dilbilimciler gösterim olgusu için biçimbilimsel, sözdizimsel, anlambilimsel ve edimbilimsel araştırmalar yapmıştır. Ancak bu araştırmalar büyük bir tipolojik araştırma niteliğinde olmayıp yeterli düzeyde değildir. Bu çalışmada edimbilimsel bir konu olan gösterim kuramı Türk dilinin, edebiyatının, tarihinin ve kültürünün temel yapı taşı olan Dede Korkut’a uygulanacaktır. Edimbilimsel bir olgu olarak gösterim, Dede Korkut’a uygulanırken edimbilimsel bir bakış açısı sunulmak istenmiştir. Farklı hikâyelerden seçmeler yapılmış olup gösterim konusunda en belirgin örnekler ile her bakımdan bünyesinde zenginlik barındıran Dede Korkut’ta gösterimsel unsurların da zengin bir varlığından söz etmek kaçınılmazdır.
Yeni Uygur Türkçesinde sürerlik görünüşünün bildiriminde kullanılan pek çok gösterge bulunmaktadır. Sürerlik göstergeleri, biçim bilgisel kategoride olabileceği gibi söz dizimsel kategoride de yer alabilir. Sürerliği ifade etmek için kullanılan göstergeler yalnızca ek ve tasvir fiilleri ile sınırlı değildir. Sıfat tamlamaları, ikilemeler, zarf-fiil grupları ve isim+yardımcı fiil yapısındaki birleşik fiiller de sürerlik bildirimine hizmet eder. Söz dizimsel kategorideki sürerlik göstergeleri, kimi zaman Men her küni öyge kélidiġanmen cümlesinde olduğu gibi sürerlik görünüşünü atayarak yönlendirici bir rol oynarken kimi zaman Ḳuyaş her küni şerḳtin çiḳar cümlesindeki gibi bu görünüşte pekiştirici bir rol üstlenir. Bu çalışmada, Yeni Uygur Türkçesindeki söz dizimsel sürerlik göstergelerinin ortaya konulması amaçlanmıştır. Sürerlik göstergeleri sıfat tamlamalarından oluşan sürerlik göstergeleri, ikilemelerden oluşan sürerlik göstergeleri, fiilimsi gruplarından oluşan sürerlik göstergeleri, birleşik fiillerden oluşan sürerlik göstergeleri olmak üzere dört ana başlık altında incelenmiştir. Birleşik fiiller, isim+yardımcı fiil yapısındaki birleşik fiillerden oluşan sürerlik göstergeleri ve fiil+zarf-fiil eki+yardımcı fiil yapısındaki birleşik fiillerden oluşan sürerlik göstergeleri olmak üzere alt başlıklara ayrılmıştır.
This paper aims to analyze the non-native use of Spanish verbs of different aspectual classes by Mandarin Chinese speakers performing oral narrative tasks. In this work, we adopt Vendler’s (Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in philosophy . Ithaca: Cornell University Press) lexical-aspect classification (states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements), and we analyze the Spanish L2 acquisition of these categories by sinophones both at the level of the lexical form acquisition and at the semantic level. Based on data obtained from two oral narrative tasks elicited from storyboard vignettes performed by three groups of learners of L2/L3 Spanish (ranging from B1 to C1 levels of the CEFR), this work supports Jiang’s (Jiang, Nan. 2000. Lexical development and representation in a second language. Applied Linguistics 21(1). 47–77) L2 lexical acquisition pattern at the lexical form level, as our sinophone learners show a similar pattern to the one observed in native speakers in the use of aspectual class of compositional form (accomplishments)and aspectual classes of individual form (states, activities and achievements). However, at the lexical semantic level, we found that, besides L2 proficiency, the properties of lexical semantics may also impact learners’ L2 lexical processing.
In linguistics, a corpus is a set of annotated linguistic data (speeches, texts, conversations, etc.) and metadata. Among the different types of corpora, the bidirectional parallel corpus is a corpus made of an original text (in a language A) and its translation in a language B, and vice versa. This kind of corpus is used to study and compare different languages. Our study focuses on the words “come” and “go” in French (venir and aller) and in Thai (มา ma and ไป pai). In both languages, these words are polyfunctional (i.e., they have both lexical and grammatical meanings, for instance, verb and auxiliary). We use a literary bidirectional parallel French-Thai corpus (from French to Thai : Maïté Coiffure, Marie-Aude Murail 2004 ; and from Thai to French : The Happiness of Kati, Jane Vejjajiva 2003). This study aims to address the difficulties regarding the different uses of “come” and “go” in French and Thai encountered by FLE (French as a Foreign Language) and TFL (Thai as a Foreign Language) students. These words are indeed used as full lexical verbs, or alternatively as tense-aspect-modality auxiliaries. We show how our corpus address these issues, and more generally, what are the possible applications of such corpora in language teaching and translation.
Энэхүү шүүмж өгүүлэлд Америкийн хэл шинжлэлч Карлота С.Смитийн дэвшүүлсэн Байдлын хоёр бүрэлдэхүүнт онолыг (Two-component theory of aspect) авч хэлэлцлээ. Байдлын хоёр бүрэлдэхүүнт онолд өгүүлбэрийн байдлын утга нь тухайн өгүүлбэрийн илэрхийлж буй “үйлийн төрөл” (situation types) болон өгүүлэгчийн үйлийг “харах өнцөг” (viewpoint) хоёрын харилцан зохицол гэж үздэг. Үйлийн төрөл нь өгүүлбэрийн үндсэн үйл үг, түүний гадаад, дотоод аргументуудаар илрэх тул утга зүйн айд, харин харах өнцөг нь нөхцөл, задлаг бүтэц зэргээр илрэх тул хэл зүйн айд тус тус хамаарах үзэгдлүүд юм. Үйлийг хөдлөнгө эсэх (dynamicity), үргэлжлэх эсэх (durativity), дотоод хязгаартай эсэх (telicity) гэсэн гурван шалгуурыг харгалзан тогтонги төлөв (state), үйл явц (activity), биелэлт (accomplishment), төгсөл (achievement), агшин зуурын үйл (semelfactive) гэсэн таван төрөлд хувааж болох бол, харин харах цэг нь Төгс (perfective), Төгс бус (imperfective), Тодорхой бус (neutral) гэсэн гурван янз байна. Эдгээрийн харилцан зохицол хэл болгонд өөр өөр байдаг. Жишээлбэл, Англи хэлэнд тогтонги төлөв төгс бус байдалтай зохицдоггүй бол, монгол хэлэнд зохицдог. Өгүүллийн төгсгөлд зохиогч Байдлын хоёр бүрэлдэхүүнт онолын учир дутагдалтай талыг дурдаж, уг онолыг боловсронгуй болгох талаар санал бодлоо дэвшүүллээ.
This chapter argues that stylistics and literary criticism should be integrated in the teaching of stylistics. The tensions between linguistic and literary criticism and their mutual rejection of the value of the other’s contribution to the study of literary texts are long-standing. Most stylisticians have attempted to show that stylistics has got a greater explanatory power than impressionistic critical evaluations of literary texts. However, this chapter argues that stylistic analysis can benefit immensely from the insight offered by a more historical and contextual approach to texts, which has traditionally been the preserve of literary criticism. The historical and cultural knowledge that we gain from criticism can illuminate stylistic meaning, just as significantly as linguistic analysis can illuminate critical interpretation. Through an exploration of Ezra Pound’s use of the present perfect aspect, the chapter shows that the cultural, historical and biographical information that literary scholarship provides can enrich the linguistic analysis.KeywordsEzra PoundPresent perfectLiterary criticismIntentionBiographical criticismPedagogical stylistics
This paper tackles the usefulness of comparing L2 learners against native speakers in empirical SLA studies focusing on grammatical aspect. Adapting the view that interlanguage grammars should be analysed in their own right instead of as a deficient form of the target, we show that expressing perspectivity (fulfilled by grammatical aspect markers) methodologically complicates the analyses of Grammaticality Judgment Tasks in aspect studies. For Spanish past tenses, we show that especially with items constructed as allegedly ungrammatical natives behave heterogeneously. This casts doubt on the question whether these data can be used as a baseline against which learners’ data could be compared. By analysing the interlanguage separately (not only in comparison to the controls), our findings among German learners of L2 Spanish suggest the use of the forms depends essentially on temporal markers which can be related to both their L1 lacking grammatical aspect and the pedagogical input. Crucially, though the interlanguage does not match the target (i.e., past tenses do not necessarily correlate with aspectuality), the systems are not chaotic but follow well-defined rules.
En este artículo se desarrolla un análisis cualitativo de la construcción progresiva verbal inglesa a partir de una muestra del conjunto de corpus York-Toronto-Helsinki-Penn, en aras de ilustrar los patrones de cambio semántico-aspectual que experimenta esta construcción a lo largo de su desarrollo diacrónico. Se elabora un análisis cognitivista que indica la persistencia de las configuraciones aspectuales propias de la categoría progresiva del inglés actual desde los períodos medievales. En este análisis, el concepto de gradiente lingüístico parece explicar las diferencias en las conceptualizaciones que caracterizan a la categoría en cada período en virtud de la estructura formal de la construcción.
The standard theory of the tense and aspectual system of Sinhala language states that there are two grammatical tenses (past, non-past) and no morphological aspects in Sinhala. Here we show that the grammatical categories identified as tenses in the standard theory do not actually denote grammatical tense (external time reference). These categories express the internal temporal constituency of an action. Two categories are roughly related to the imperfective and the perfective aspect. We rename these categories as Animitha (non-past inflections in the standard theory) and Nimitha (past inflections in the standard theory). Animitha is related to the imperfective aspect. Nimitha is related to the perfective aspect. Additionally, Animitha is used for the expression of future. (This is not future tense but future expression such as future in past, future in non-past.) Explicitly, Animitha is used to denote continuous actions (progressive aspect), repeating actions (distributive aspect and other repeating actions except for iterative aspect), habitual actions (habitual aspect), a possible incident (future expression), newspaper headlines regardless of time whereas Nimitha is used to denote an action taken as a whole (imperfective aspect) regardless of time. This new theory implies Sinhala is a tenseless language.
සිංහල භාෂාවේ කාලභේදය ගැන ප්රධාන මතවාද දෙකක් පවතී. පළමු වැන්න අතීත, වර්තමාන, අනාගත යන කාල තුනක් පවතී ය යන පැරණි මතයයි. දෙවැන්න කුමාරතුංග මුනිදාස මහතා ඉදිරිපත් කළ සිංහල භාෂාවේ අතීත අනතීත යනුවෙන් කාල දෙකක් පමණක් ඇත යනුවෙන් ඇති නූතන මතයයි. මෙම අධ්යයනයෙන් අප මෙම මත දෙකට ම ප්රතිවිරුද්ධව සිංහල භාෂාව කාලභේද රහිත (tenseless) භාෂාවක් බව පෙන්වා දෙමු.
U ovom radu funkciju sadašnjeg perfekta u engleskom jeziku analiziramo polazeći od leksičkog aspekta. Kako bi za početak eliminisali uticaj konteksta, analizu vršimo na izolovanim primjerima različitih tipova glagolske situacije, koje dalje modeliramo objektom i adverbijalima. Dakle, analiza se kreće od glagola, preko glagolske fraze, do predikata. Rezultati pokazuju da je većinu poznatih upotreba sadašnjeg perfekta u engleskom jeziku moguće svesti na jedan zajednički imenitelj, a da su sve druge razlike u značenju stvar konteksta. Analiza pokazuje i kakva ograničenja postoje u pogledu mogućnosti kombinovanja određenih tipova leksičkog aspekta sa pojedinim upotrebama sadašnjeg perfekta. Preciznije rečeno, upravo sadejstvo leksičkog aspekta, objekta i adverbijala kreira ono što tradicionalno nazivamo različitim upotrebama sadašnjeg perfekta. 1. Uvod Comrie (1985:1) glagolsko vrijeme definiše kao gramatikalizaciju lokacije u vremenu. Suštinski važan dodatak ovoj definiciji predstavlja njegova napomena da gramatička kategorija vremena nekim jezičkim izrazom, obično, ali ne isključivo glagolom, smješta neki događaj na određeno mjesto na vremenskoj osi (1985:12). Prihvatajući ovo stanovište, u ovom radu želimo da utvrdimo u kojoj mjeri se značenje nekog iskaza u sadašnjem perfektu može pripisati kategoriji vremena, a u kojoj leksičkom aspektu, objektu i adverbijalu 1. Kategoriju leksičkog aspekta shvatamo kao unutrašnji aspekatski potencijal glagola. Vendlerovu (Vendler, 1967) kategorizaciju glagolskih situacija na stanja (states), aktivnosti (activities), ostvarenja (accomplishments) i dostignuća (achi-evements) značajno smo modifikovali za potrebe ovog istraživanja. Kategoriju glagolskog aspekta shvatamo kao izraz želje govornika da istakne unutrašnju strukturu glagolske situacije ili da je predstavi kao cjelinu, za šta odabira progresivnu odnosno neprogresivnu morfemu (up. Comrie, 1985, Kabakčiev, 2000). 1 Rad se bavi samo prostim sadašnjim perfektom, ali ćemo se na nekim mjestima dotaći i uticaja Rad se bavi samo prostim sadašnjim perfektom, ali ćemo se na nekim mjestima dotaći i uticaja progresivne morfeme na glagolsku situaciju, te time i progresivnog sadašnjeg perfekta.
Establishing temporal order between events and resolving bridging references are crucial for automatic discourse understanding. For that, effective event and mention representations are essential to accurately solve temporal relation classification and bridging resolution. This thesis addresses exactly that and designs novel approaches to obtain more expressive event and mention representations.Contextual and commonsense information are needed for obtaining such effective representations. However, acquiring and injecting them is a challenging task because, on the one hand, it is hard to distinguish useful context itself from bigger paragraphs or documents and also equally difficult to process bigger contexts computationally. On the other hand, obtaining commonsense information like humans acquire, is still an open research question. The earlier attempts of hand engineered event and mention representations are not sufficient for acquiring contextual information. Moreover, most of the approaches are inadequate at capturing commonsense information as they again resorted to hand-picky approaches of acquiring such information from sources like dictionaries, web, or knowledge graphs. In our work, we get rid of these inefficacious approaches of getting event and mention representations.First, we obtain contextual information to improve event representations by providing neighboring n-words of the event. We also use character-based representation of events capture tense, and aspect information from the internal structure of event head words. We also go a step further and learn interactions over these event representations to get rich event-pair representations. We find that our improved event representations demonstrate substantial gains over an approach which relied only on the event head embeddings. Also, our ablation study proves the effectiveness of complex interaction learning as well as the role of character embeddings. Next, we probe transformer language models(e.g. BERT) that are proved to be better at capturing context. We investigate specifically for bridging inference to understand the capacity of these models at capturing bridging information. The purpose of this investigation is to use these understandings for making informed decisions at designing better transformer models to further improve mention representations. For that, we examine the model's internal structure individually and then the whole model. The investigation shows that pre-trained models are surprisingly good at capturing bridging information and these capabilities are highly context dependent, as they perform poorly with distorted contexts. Further, our qualitative analysis shows that BERT is capable of capturing basic commonsense information but fails to capture sophisticated information which is required for bridging resolution. Finally, we combine both contextual and commonsense information for further improving event and mention representations. We inject commonsense information with the use of knowledge graphs for both temporal relation classification and bridging anaphora resolution tasks. We take a principled approach at acquiring such knowledge where we employ graph node embeddings learned over knowledge graphs to capture the overall topology of the graph as a result gaining holistic external information. Specifically, we used graph node embeddings learned over Wordnet and TEMPROB and combined them with text-only embeddings like word2vec, BERT, etc. to obtain knowledge-aware representations. We evaluated our approach over standard datasets like ISNotes, BASHI, and ARRAU for bridging anaphora resolution and MATRES for temporal relation classification. We observe substantial gains in performances over text-only representations on both tasks proving the effectiveness of our approach.
RESUMEN Este trabajo estudia los niveles de adquisición de los tiempos aspectuales pasados del español por aprendices sinohablantes basados en los datos de comprensión y producción de un corpus. El objetivo de este trabajo de síntesis es evaluar la comprensión y producción del aspecto en español en la interlengua de aprendices sinohablantes observada en distintos niveles de competencia lingüística (de B1 a C1) a través de la puesta en relación entre los datos procedentes de pruebas sobre la comprensión y la producción del aspecto en español como L2. Los resultados muestran que nuestros aprendices solo consiguen comprender incluso en el nivel C1 parte de la información de input, aunque buscan compensar este vacío ajustando sus estrategias en la producción, si bien esta estrategia parece más una regla mecánica, en lugar de un patrón interno cercano a la producción de los nativos. ABSTRACT This work is a study on the levels of acquisition of the Spanish aspectual past tenses by Mandarin Chinese speakers based on a corpus data, as well as on our previous works on it. The aim of this paper is to synthesize and evaluate the IL competence of Chinese learners concerning Spanish L2 aspect through comprehension and production tasks. Data from Mandarin Chinese L1 learners of different levels of linguistic competence (ranging from B1 to C1) were gathered and analyzed for showing differences across levels and tasks. A difference in the relationship between comprehension and production data was found in the acquisition process of L2 Spanish. Results show that our learners can only grasp part of the input information, but they still seek for more information from new input to fill the gap in Revista Nebrija de Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza de Lenguas (RNAEL)
This article discusses an investigation into the English modal predicate with can and the perfect infinitive form of the main verb. The study uses language samples excerpted from The Corpus of Contemporary American English, as well as selected data from The Corpus of Historical American English and The British National Corpus. English grammars tend not to discuss can with the perfect infinitive form, which can give an impression that it does not exist. Nevertheless, the reported study confirms that can with the perfect infinitive form is present in both American and British Englishes, mainly in formal, written communication. In the US, it was used already at the beginning of the 19th century. Furthermore, can with the perfect infinitive form expresses either the speaker’s reasoning about a hypothetical past situation or speaker’s certainty that a situation did not take place in the past. Thus, can interacts with the perfect and yields epistemic readings. Additionally, subject negation extends its scope over the proposition. The propositional negation interacts with can, thus producing the meaning of speaker’s certainty. Finally, the findings of the study are used to determine the norms which may underlie the modal predicate with can and the perfect infinitive form. “Few people can have seen it” – badanie rzekomo nienormatywnej konstrukcji z czasownikiem can i formą bezokolicznika perfect Streszczenie: Artykuł omawia badanie angielskiego orzeczenia modalnego z czasownikiem can i formą bezokolicznika perfect czasownika głównego. W badaniu wykorzystano próbki języka z korpusu The Corpus of Contemporary American English oraz wybrane dane z korpusów: The Corpus of Historical American English i The British National Corpus. Gramatyki języka angielskiego zwykle nie omawiają can z perfectem, co może sprawiać wrażenie, że ta konstrukcja nie istnieje. Niemniej, opisane badanie potwierdziło obecność can z perfectem w angielszczyźnie zarówno amerykańskiej jak i brytyjskiej, zwłaszcza w oficjalnej komunikacji pisanej. Użycie tej konstrukcji w Stanach Zjednoczonych zarejestrowano już na początku XIX w. Can z perfectem wyraża wnioskowanie mówiącego odnośnie hipotetycznej sytuacji z przeszłości lub pewność nadawcy, że sytuacja nie wystąpiła w przeszłości. Zatem can wchodzi w interakcję z perfectem i w efekcie wyraża znaczenia epistemiczne. Nadto, negacja podmiotu obejmuje swym zasięgiem cały sąd logiczny i wchodzi w interakcję z can, w wyniku czego powstaje znaczenie pewności mówiącego. Na koniec określono normy, które mogły były przyczynić się do powstania orzeczenia modalnego z can i perfectem.
Talyshi, classified as belonging to the Northwestern Iranian group of languages, includes a wide range of dialects, which, based on phonological, grammatical and lexical factors, are traditionally divided into three main clusters: Northern, Central and Southern (see Bazin 1980; Stilo 1981; Yarshater 1996). Anbarāni is a Northern Talyshi dialect spoken in Anbarān district (baxš) of Namin sub-provincial district (šahrestān) (Ardabil province) of Iran, in the city of Anbarān and adjacent villages. Relatively a large number of studies deal with the Northern Talyshi dialects spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan. For example, “The Talyshi Texts” by Professor of Iranian Studies Boris Miller, includes short stories, anecdotes, conversations, poetic verses (see Miller 1930) written down in these dialects. Unlike the Northern Talyshi dialects spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Anbarāni dialect is little known and less studied therefore the number of texts, published in this dialect, is quite limited. The aim of this paper is to broaden the scope of knowledge on Anbarāni by introducing a short story of Mullah Nasreddin and analyzing a number of morphological, syntactical and lexical dialectal features based on the text.
Grammatical aspect encodes temporal features of a situation mainly as completed (perfective) or incomplete (imperfective). In the present study, the effect of perfective vs. imperfective grammatical aspects on highlighting different participants of an event has been investigated by means of exploring the role of aspect on the interpretation of the ambiguous third person singular subject pronoun and discourse relations in Persian. To this end, 75 native speakers of Persian participated in a story completion task. After reading a simple transfer-of-possession sentence in each of the three aspects, namely perfective, imperfective, and progressive, they wrote natural continuations to the sentence. The second sentence, which was to be completed, began with the Persian third person singular pronoun /u:/ ("he/she"). The task sentences consisted of 18 critical and 20 filler sentences. Filler sentences were used to disguise the purpose of the task. The acquired data were analyzed using chi-square significance test in SPSS. Results showed that: First, Source/subject preference has outnumbered Goal preference in all the aspectual conditions. This finding was interpreted as confirming the first-mention bias in the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in Persian. Second, Source vs Goal preference of pronouns is significantly affected by the grammatical aspect such that the perfective contexts produce less Source preference but more Goal preference when interpreting pronouns compared to the imperfective contexts. Third, there is a significant relationship between the aspect type and the type of the discourse relation connecting the two sentences. In fact, the perfective aspect seems to bias the second sentence in the direction of shifting its focus to the Goal of the first sentence and extending the effect of the first event. Also, the imperfective aspect seems to bias the second sentence in the direction of focusing on the Source of the first sentence and providing explanations and details to the first event. Overall, the findings are in line with the predictions of the first-mention bias and the event structure hypothesis in the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns.
Die Untersuchung der Futurität im Französischen der Gegenwart beschreibt im Spannungsfeld von Semantik und Pragmatik die Verwendungstypen der Tempora futur simple, futur périphrastique, futur antérieur und présent futural. Die temporalen und modalen Tempusverwendungen werden als Resultat einer strukturierten Interaktion von Tempussemantik und Kontextfaktoren aufgefaßt, zu denen Negation und grammatische
Person, aber auch pragmatische Konstellationen und Texttypen zählen. Die Darstellung fokussiert so die Vernetzung von Tempussemantik, Kontextfaktoren und semantisch-pragmatischem Potential der Tempora.
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