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Classification of Verbal Actions in Typologically Unrelated Languages
Abstract
Using Chinese, Italian and Slovene as examples, I develop a theoretical framework suitable for classifying aspectual systems in unrelated languages. I base my proposal on existing classifications (Smith, The parameter of aspect, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1997; Xiao and McEnery, Aspect in Mandarin Chinese. A corpus-based study, John Benjamin Publishing Company, Amsterdam; Philadelphia, 2004; Koenig and Chief Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 7:241–262, 2008; Peck et al. Language and linguistics 14:663–700, 2013) but adopt it slightly to better fit classifications between languages with less similar features. In the second part of this extensive chapter, I present the aspectual systems of the three languages that are the focus of the present study. First, I introduce the principles of the Chinese aspectual system, paying particular attention to the way perfectivity and imperfectivity are expressed in the language, and I conclude with an account of the interplay between the properties of verb typology and the mechanisms available in Chinese for conveying grammatical aspect. Similarly, I also present the aspectual systems in Italian and Slovenian, always focusing on the specific properties and features related to aspect that are most salient in the language under consideration and consequently could have the greatest impact on linguistic transfer from one language to another.KeywordsLexical aspectGrammatical aspectVerb typologyAspect in ChineseAspect in ItalianAspect in Slovenian
The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive account of how perfective aspect is realized in Urdu, focusing on the structural elements that convey perfectivity and their meaning. Grammatical aspects represent the temporal structure of situations and can be categorized as perfective or imperfective. Perfective aspect conveys a sense of closure or culmination, while imperfective aspect indicates continuity within a situation. The meaning of perfective forms varies across languages, and this paper discusses the realization of perfective aspect with respect to different types of situations. In contrast to English, where perfective predicates consistently convey a sense of completion across all types of situations, Urdu past participles do not always convey this meaning, particularly in dynamic situations with natural endpoints that require a compound verb combination. In Urdu, perfectivity is expressed through a combination of a main verb and a light verb that encodes the perfective aspectual value and additional information about how the situation occurred. Unlike aspectual auxiliaries, Urdu light verbs have an indexing function that links the situation expressed in the perfective predicate to another situation. Additionally, this paper illustrates how light verbs in Urdu add a stative meaning component to perfective predicates, which distinguishes them from English perfective predicates.
Normalmente in italiano, in una frase principale, per riferirci al passato, abbia mo la scelta fra Imperfetto (scrivevo), Passato Prossimo (PP) (ho scritto), e Passato Remoto (PR) (scrissi). Trascuriamo qui ii fatto che Imperfetto e PR appartengano inequivocabilmente al paradigma morfologico del verbo, mentre il PP è una forma composta, costruita sintatticamente, che si potrebbe voler affiancare ad altri costrutti, come sto scrivendo ecc.; del resto ci sono proposte generativiste di considerare ii PP come risultante dall'inserimento di una frase al passato entro un predicato al presente (l'ausiliare). Postuliamo invece che, a qualche livello, si ponga, nel sistema verbale italiano, la scelta fra i tre paradigmi citati (indipendentemente dalla constatazione che essi di fatto compaiono nelle tradizionali grammatiche italiane). Notiamo anche che ii Trapassato Prossimo, in maniera esplicita o implicita, e ii Trapassato Remoto in ma niera esplicita, nell'italiano modemo indicano anteriorità relativa, rispetto a un altro punto di riferimento passato.
在zai and着zhe are commonly recognized imperfective aspect makers in Mandarin Chinese, though there are noticeable differences between their distributions and functions. By resorting to origins, historical evolutions, and corpus data for the meanings and functions of these two characters, it can be observed that they are both polysemies displaying semantic networks organized around a central sense respectively and the characters 在 and 着 are distinct form and meaning pairings. 在 is a construction indicating presence within a certain range while 着generally denotes ‘reach to’. Related to their basic meanings, 在 and 着 exhibit some constraints respectively when marking imperfective aspect. From this character-based constructional account, 在’s and 着’s qualifications as Chinese imperfective aspect markers are theoretically arguable.
This paper discusses the new aktionsart of traversativity, here defined as the category marking the phase of ‘getting-through’ an event or a situation. Different from completives and resultatives (cf. Bybee et al. 1994), traversatives do not profile a phasal contiguity with the telos of a situation, and thus detach the actionality of the event from a subsequent resultant phase. This entails that, along a perfective cline of change, the aktionsart of traversatives triggers aspectual discontinuity or anti-resultativity (cf. Plungian & van der Auwera 2006). Drawing on this, the present work focuses on the grammaticalization of the traversative particle 过
guò
in Mandarin Chinese towards experiential perfect (cf. Cao 1995, Lin 2004, Liu 2009) and interpersonal evidential (IE) usages (cf. Tantucci 2013, 2014a, 2014b). I argue that the experiential and evidential reanalyses V-过
guò
are semantically and pragmatically prompted by the original traversative aktionsart of the particle 过
guò
. I further discuss this phenomenon through a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis shedding light on the correspondence between specific written genres and the synchronic employment of V-过
guò
either as a phasal, an experiential or an interpersonal evidential (IE) marker. Finally, I suggest that actional discontinuity or anti-resultativity constitutes a productive semantic-pragmatic trigger of further evidential reanalyses of a construction.
This article criticizes the widespread view, sometimes referred to as the " aspect first hypothesis " (initiated by Antinucci and Miller 1976 and supported by Bloom et al. 1980; Bickerton 1981; Weist et al. 1984; Shirai and Andersen 1995, among others), according to which a universal acquisition path is postulated in the tense-aspect domain, based on the leading role of actionality (or Aktionsart) and aspect. According to this view, children build their competence starting from the pervasive correlations atelic∴imperfective∴present vs. telic∴perfective∴past, before gradually learning to disentangle (i.e., freely combining) the various actional, aspectual, and temporal components. The alternative view advocated here (typologically-oriented and morphologically-sensitive) claims, instead, that children start out with no predefined strategy and extract the relevant information out of the individual language's morphological structure. The data stem from four longitudinal corpora relating to three Italian children and one Austrian German child, showing that: (i) the strong correlation between actionality, aspect, and tense can only be supported if activity and stative verbs are lumped together within the category of atelic predicates. Once activities are separately examined, their behavior stands out as absolutely incompatible with the traditional view. (ii) In the relevant languages, there can be earlier understanding of the temporality-oriented morphology as contrasted with the aspect-related categories. (iii) The analysis does not support the so-called prototype hypothesis (Shirai and Andersen 1995), since the examined children were strongly affected by their linguistic input from the very beginning. (iv) The children presented (to a greater or lesser extent) a notable verb spurt that very briefly preceded the first uses of the Past tenses. In conclusion, the actual acquisition path followed by the analyzed children undermines the hypothesis of a universal acquisition pattern, supporting instead the view that acquisition depends on the specific morphological shape of the target language.
3 Previous studies of the lexical aspect of verbs following Vendler (1967) cannot account for verbs of degree achievements (Dowty 1979, Hay et al. 1999, among others). Building on recent studies on " scale structure " (Hay et al. 1999, Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010, among others). We introduce a new aspectual feature [±scale] into the traditional Vendler system in order to more comprehensively account for a wider range of verbs. By analyzing verbs/verbal compounds from Mandarin Chinese and following the scalar approach, we propose six aspectual classes that are needed not only to adequately accommodate degree achievements, but also to provide a fuller account of all the verbs. This scalar approach can be applied to the aspectual classification of natural languages in general.
This paper surveys the progressive and resultative morphology of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, and argues that although the distinction between perfective and imperfective is the most fundamental of aspectual distinctions, analysis of these languages reveals that this distinction can sometimes be murky. A unified account of the imperfective morphology in these languages is presented which relies on the interaction of inherent aspect and viewpoint aspect markers (Smith 1991). It is suggested that the differences among these languages are the results of the different patterns and degrees of grammaticization of their imperfective markers.
The traditional "pair" model of Russian aspect fails to distinguish among Perfectives and ignores the fact that most verbs exist in larger clusters of three or more aspectually related forms. I propose semantic parameters that account for the interaction of aspect and actionality and use them to construct a semantic map of Russian aspectual relationships. I show, using a multiply stratified sample of 283 verb clusters (including over 2000 verbs), that the composition of clusters conforms to a strict implicational hierarchy that predicts all and only the cluster types attested in Russian. The proposed model replaces aspectual "pairs" with a model that captures the more complex reality of aspectual relationships among Russian verbs and provides a hypothesis for cross-linguistic comparison.
ing from formal details, we think that the major conclusion of our research is that actionality can be properly defined as the way in which events are composed out of smaller events. We have proven that in order for this definition to be effective only a small set of assumptions concerning the domain of event semantics has to be made. As a side effect of this assumption we derived the existence of two actional classes which have never received much attention in the relevant literature: eventive punctuals and stative punctuals. References ...
Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the literature.
While working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation. for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycho linguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. A National Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation Theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, also gave me time to pursue this project. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Osten Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentless comments and questions throughout. People with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. lowe a special debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real differ ence to the final form of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including colloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and University of Tel Aviv. I thank Adrienne Diehr and Marjorie Troutner for their efficient and good-humored help throughout the work on the first edition.
This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning 'kill' in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dead, and (B) X kill Y but Y not die. The different syntactic properties among these verbs suggest that the verbs for 'kill' in the three languages are not completely semantically equivalent. It is found that the resulting dead event of kill in English is lexically entailed but that of shā in Chinese is merely implied. Thai is a more complicated case. The verbs for 'kill' in the three languages are thus classified into different categories based on their syntactic and semantic properties.
This study reports three experiments on how children learning Mandarin Chinese comprehend and use aspect markers. These experiments examine the role of lexical aspect in children's acquisition of grammatical aspect. Results provide converging evidence for children's early sensitivity to (1) the association between atelic verbs and the imperfective aspect markers zai, -zhe, and -ne, and (2) the association between telic verbs and the perfective aspect marker -le. Children did not show a sensitivity in their use or understanding of aspect markers to the difference between stative and activity verbs or between semelfactive and activity verbs. These results are consistent with Slobin's (1985) basic child grammar hypothesis that the contrast between process and result is important in children's early acquisition of temporal morphology. In contrast, they are inconsistent with Bickerton's (1981, 1984) language bioprogram hypothesis that the distinctions between state and process and between punctual and nonpunctual are preprogrammed into language learners. We suggest new ways of looking at the results in the light of recent probabilistic hypotheses that emphasize the role of input, prototypes and connectionist representations.
Perfectivity is often assumed to entail the completion of the event described by eventdenoting stems and their arguments. Although some scholars have noted that perfective markers do not always entail completion, their formal definitions contradict their informal descriptions. We show that these traditional models of perfective aspect cannot account for the aspectual system of Thai. In Thai, perfective markers do not entail that the event was completed: the resulting state of sentences that are in appareance telic in their 'inner aspect' need not have been reached. We call these non-completive perfective markers semiperfectives. We propose a formal model of semi-perfectivity within Discourse Representation Theory that relies on the inclusion of an imperfective operator in the lexical meaning of Thai accomplishment verbs as well as the notion of maximal event relative to an event description. We show that this latter notion is strictly weaker than the traditional notion of telicity, thus demonstrating that (a)telicity is not the sole property of event descriptions relevant to the semantics of grammatical aspect.
This reference grammar provides, for the first time, a description of the grammar of "Mandarin Chinese", the official spoken language of China and Taiwan, in functional terms, focusing on the role and meanings of word-level and sentence-level structures in actual conversations.
This study investigates crosslinguistic variation in the semantic domain of ac-tionality. It argues that the observed distribution of aspectual grams is best accounted for if one assumes that actionality is a parameter that allows for different settings in different languages. Entities such as "stative", "telic", "punctual" are crosslinguistic actional types in the same way as "progres-sive", "perfective", or "past" are crosslinguistic gram types. After an outline of the design of a crosslinguistic study of actionality and an initial charac-terization of basic actional meanings and their relations to the meanings of aspectual grams, in-depth case studies are presented of actionality and the as-pect/actionality interface in four genetically unrelated languages.
This paper addresses a difference between English and Mandarin Chinese in how the perfective aspect interacts with accomplishment
situations. We propose that the source of the difference lies in the different nominal systems in English and Mandarin. Specifically,
while English nominal heads distinguish count nouns from mass nouns, Mandarin nominal heads do not (Chierchia 1998).
I discuss two competing theories of the progressive: the theory proposed in Parsons (1980, 1985, 1989, 1990) and the theory proposed in Landman (1992). These theories differ in more than one way. Landman regards the progressive as an intentional operator, while Parsons doesn''t. Moreover, Landman and Parsons disagree on what uninflected predicates denote. For Landman, cross the street has in its denotation complete events of crossing the street; the aspectual contribution of English simple past (perfective aspect) is the identity function. For Parsons, both complete and incomplete events of crossing the street can be in the denotation of the base VP; perfective aspect restricts its denotation to the events that culminate. I present a version of Parsons theory that avoids the problems raised by Landman, in particular the problem posed for Parsons by creation verbs. The repaired version and Landman''s theory still differ in the way they analyze uninflected verbs. The repaired version and Landman''s theory still differ in the way they analyze uninflected predicates. I present evidence from Slavic languages that both theories are needed. Finally, I discuss some evidence that may favor one or the other approach to the semantics of the English progressive.
The study of the temporal structure of events in natural language is of prime importance in linguistics. Though there has been recent progress on formal theories of events, these theories do not address certain syntactic and semantic properties peculiar to languages such as Hindi. This paper concentrates on properties related to perfectivity. It motivates a small number of semantic features for events and their objects, such as whether an object exists independently of an event, whether it is totally affected by the event, and so on. It then formalizes these features. It also shows how they can be formalized in an algebraic framework and applied in a categorial grammar to derive the properties of verbal and nominal predicates. The result is an integration of descriptive semantics with algebraic theories of objects and events.
(cont.) to variations in the way functional elements interact with verbal roots. Overall, my work not only contributes to our understanding of how events are syntactically represented, but also explicates interactions at the syntax-semantics interface, clarifying the relationship between surface form, syntactic structure, and logical form. A theory of argument structure grounded in independently-motivated syntactic constraints, on the one hand, and the semantic structure of events, on the other hand, is able to account for a wide range of empirical facts with few stipulations.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Southern California, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 490-503).
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Sulle proprietà tempo-aspettuali dell’infinito in italiano. Studi diacronici, sincronici, contrastivi, didattici [On the temporal-aspectual properties of the infinitive in Italian. Diachronic, synchronic, contrastive, didactic studies
- Pier Bertinetto
- Marco
Konceptualizacija in upovedovanje glagolskega dejanja v slovenščini, kitajščini in italijanščini [Conceptualisation and representation of verbal action in Slovene
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Xiandai hanyu tide gongneng shijiao yanjiu [A functional approach to aspect in modern Chinese
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- Li Fu
Glagolski vid, udeleženci in glagolski položaji na primeru pomenske skupine glagolov miselnih aktivnosti [Verbal aspect, participants and verb positions on the example of the semantic group of verb describing mental activities
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Grammatica Italiana. Con nozioni di linguistica
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Poizkus modernejše obravnave glagolskih kategorij [An attempt at a more modern treatment of verb categories
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Verbs and times in Chinese: Vendler’s four categories
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Leksemski in skladenjski vpliv na vidskost
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Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore
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