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This article investigates optional ergative marking in Tujia, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in south-central China. It is shown that the Agent in Tujia is optionally marked, and that the use of the optional ergative marker ko35 is multifunctional. It is used to disambiguate the semantic role of Agent, to emphasize agency, and to focalize an Actor in a discourse context. Several factors, including word order, telicity, perfectivity, verbal semantics, information structure and discourse-pragmatics, play a role in determining the use or non-use of the ergative marker. Secondly, the historical source of the optional ergative marker is explored. It is hypothesized that the morpheme lie21 was originally an instrumental marker whose meaning became extended to encompass the marking of ergativity. Later, this morpheme lost its ergative meaning, after the third person singular pronoun ko35 acquired the role of optional ergative marker, as a result of language contact with Chinese. The analysis may enhance the understanding of the variety of uses and the sources of ergative case marking in Tibeto-Burman languages in general.

Voice-markers enable speakers to profile a situation/event in ways that reflect their perspective of ‘who’ or ‘what’ is being foregrounded as the discourse unfolds. Our diachronic study focuses on how a versatile voice marker evolves new functions as it competes for its semantic niche with other voice markers. Using data from Old Korean texts written in Kukyel and data from Middle and Modern Korean1 texts written in Hankul from the Sejong historical corpus, we show how Korean suffix -i extends from causative to middle and passive uses through reflexive causatives while competing with voice markers -eci and -key ha-. Our analysis reveals: (i) a relaxation of telicity and specificity constraints, which facilitates the extension of -i from a valence-increasing causative marker to a valence-reducing spontaneous and facilitative middle marker, and (ii) deployment of innovative morphosyntactic strategies (e.g. ‘double causatives’, ‘double passives’ and ‘hybrid passives’) to disambiguate between causative and passive uses of -i. The difference in directionality for -eci constructions (middle-to-passive development) and for -i constructions (causative-to-middle plus causative-to-passive developments) also has implications for our understanding of the development of voice systems in other languages.

Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.

Infants must learn to carve events at their joints to best understand who is doing what to whom or whether an object or agent has reached its intended goal. Recent behavioral research demonstrates that infants do not see the world as a movie devoid of meaning, but rather as a series of sub-events that include agents moving in different manners along paths from sources to goals. This research uses behavioral and electrophysiological methods to investigate infants' (10-14 months) attention to disruptions within relatively unfamiliar human action that does not rely on goal-objects to signal attainment (i.e., Olympic figure skating). Infants' visual (Study 1, N = 48) and neurophysiological (Study 2, N = 21) responses to pauses at starting points, endpoints, and within-action locations were recorded. Both measures revealed differential responses to pauses at endpoints relative to pauses elsewhere in the action (i.e., starting point; within-action). Eye-tracking data indicated that infants' visual attention was greater for events containing pauses at endpoints relative to events with pauses at starting points or within-actions. ERP activity reflecting perceptual processes in early-latency windows (200 ms) and memory updating processes in long-latency windows (700-1000 ms) showed differential activation to disruptions at the end of a figure-skating action compared to other locations. Mid-latency windows (250-750 ms), in contrast, showed enhanced activation at frontal regions across conditions, suggesting electrophysiological resources may have been recruited to encode disruptions within unfamiliar dynamic human action. Combined, results hint at broad sensitivity to endpoints as a mechanism that supports infants' proclivity for carving continuous and complex event streams into meaningful units. Findings have potential implications for language development as these units are mapped onto budding linguistic representations. We discuss empirical and methodological contributions for action perception and address potential merits and pitfalls of applying behavioral techniques in conjunction with brain-based measures to study infant development.

The role of scalarity has attracted increasing attention in recent analyses of verb-related phenomena such as aspectuality (telicity and durativity) and argument realization. A central issue in this regard is which types of verbs express a scalar change and which do not. There is some agreement that incremental theme verbs do not come with a scale but instead depend on an incremental theme argument which introduces the scale. By contrast, it is assumed that change of state verbs already lexicalize a scale as part of their meaning and may therefore be considered as scalar verbs. In this paper, we tackle the question whether all change of state verbs are scalar in the sense that they fully lexicalize a scale. We argue that a change of state verb can be scalar, even if not all of the scale parameters are lexically specified, and propose a typology of scalar underspecification. We discuss two types of strategies that are applied for the resolution of scalar underspecification: (i) introduction of a missing parameter by the context and (ii) composition with a scale-denoting argument. We focus on the compositional aspects of scale structure and illustrate the interaction between verbs and arguments in building scalar changes.

Telicity (a type of aspectual semantics information) is a syntax-semantics interface property, its semantics standardly being analyzed as the product of syntactic operations. We aimed to find out whether second language learners‟ performance on the semantics of telicity would demonstrate sensitivity to the syntax underlying telicity calculation. Results of a sentence-rating experiment involving 36 L1 Chinese/L2 English learners and 16 native English speakers suggest that our L2ers may not have acquired the requisite syntactic knowledge for telicity interpretation.

The paper examines syntax and semantics of complex predicates in Ossetian, an Iranian language spoken in the Central Caucasus. Ossetian, being a language where complex predicates participate in the causative-inchoative alternation, offers us an opportunity to investigate a case where the alternation is blocked by telicizing prefixes if the non-verbal component is not eventive. To account for this effect, an analysis is developed in which eventive and non-eventive non-verbal components are integrated into the event structure in considerably different ways. Eventivity/non-eventivity determines different attachment options for telicizing prefixes, hence constrains the spell-out of the whole structure in different ways. As a consequence of this, for one class of complex predicates, but not for the other, both causative and inchoative prefixed configurations can be spelled out by the same set of lexical items, and the alternation obtains.

This paper discusses the semantic constraints on impersonal passives in several languages, including German and Dutch. Corpus data support earlier assumptions that the situation denoted by impersonal passives is a homogeneous (e.g. atelic) event. Telic (or unaccusative) verb lexemes can be used in the impersonal passive if they are forced into event-structural homogeneity. I will attempt to derive this event-structural restriction from the referential demotion of the subject argument. In this view, the telicity restriction is not a strict independent constraint but rather an epiphenomenon of the referential non-individuation of the argument undergoing a change of state. Another widely acknowledged claim is that impersonal passives in some languages including German, Dutch, and Icelandic are restricted to human (or animate) agents. I will show that this condition turns out to be too restrictive for Dutch and German, once real discourse data are considered. In order to capture the cross-linguistic variation, I will draw upon notions related to proto-agentivity instead of animacy. In my analysis, both constraints on impersonal passives are tied to the meaning of the demoted argument. The event-structural telicity restriction is a consequence of its demoted referential properties, animacy is an effect of its proto-agent properties.

This paper seeks to give a unified semantics for perfectivity in Russian within an explicitly decompositional syntactic framework. The aim is to account for the similar behaviour of the perfective class of predicates, despite the differences in the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the prefixes that attach to imperfective roots to give the perfective form. The first part of the paper gives the data that show that prefix types must be separated into at least two types (‘inner’ or ‘lexical’ prefixes vs. ‘outer’ or ‘superlexical’ prefixes) and that traditional notions of telicity and/or quantization are not uniformly correlated with linguistic perfectivity. The second half of the paper argues for an interpretation of perfectivity as corresponding to the ‘definiteness’ of the assertion time with respect to the run time of the event, in terms of a syntax–semantics account that makes use of both event and time variables.

This paper proposes an account of the syntactic basis for determining the relationship between event structure and ‘time-structure’ in simple tenses. In general, event telicity corresponds to temporal boundedness. But there are cases of mismatch, as in (1) and (2): (1) John broke glasses (for an hour); (2) They gave up for a while. It is argued that such cases arise vP-externally in (Viewpoint) Aspect, and concern the mapping from Event-time to Reference-time. The present paper proposes an account of the syntactic relations that underlie the temporal relationship between Reference Time and Event Time, with the goal of explaining (a) the basis for event/ET homomorphism, (b) the typical cases of ET/RT temporal homomorphism, and (c) the circumstances that allow non-homomorphism. Temporal relations are constructed derivationally, starting with event structure. Event structure itself is defined in lexico-syntactic structure, and is not altered in derivations. It is homomorphic with Event-time. Event-time can appear to be altered via partitive antecedence relations with RT.

In this article, I argue that the difference between telicity and perfectivity falls out from the interaction of morphology and syntactic structure in temporal construal. I assume that interpretation of the sentence is subject to a constraint on the interface between syntax and the Conceptual–Intentional component of mind, namely that the situation the VP describes must be placed in the spatial expanse and in the time interval of the speaker's world (or in a space-time world accessible to the speaker). The verb phrase is associated with a spatial construal, while the TP receives a temporal construal; hence the same element may receive a spatial or temporal interpretation depending on whether it is merged within the VP or the TP. The approach is applied to English aspects formed with the auxiliary have and to Russian particle–verb complexes with perfective and imperfective readings.

The Spanish intransitive motion verbs subir ‘go up’ and bajar ‘go down’ variably appear with the middle marker se. In this study, we examine aspectual (telicity, punctuality) and pragmatic (counter-expectation, speaker involvement) analyses of se-marking. Adopting the variationist method, we operationalize and test hypotheses via quantitative analysis of variation between the middle se-marked and non-se-marked forms in corpora of spoken and written Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Variability in se-marking is structured, as shown by recurrent patterns reflected in frequencies of co-occurrence. We adduce evidence that factors in speakers’ choice of the middle se-marked form include a focus on the moment of change (operationalized by co-occurring locative preposition), the foregrounding of the situation (clause type), the topicality of the subject (subject expression), and speaker involvement (grammatical person, tense-mood-aspect); that is, a confluence of aspectual and pragmatic factors. Multivariate analysis further reveals that se-marking is most likely to occur in a particular ‘enter–exit a vehicle’ subir–bajar construction. A number of other constructions with clear se-marking preferences also emerge from the data. Rather than generalizations about abstract structures, the empirical results reveal usage-based constructions of differing degrees of lexical specificity and fixedness. A usage-based constructions approach allows us to dispense with a grammar–pragmatics dichotomy.

This paper argues that Nepali is neither a fully ergative language nor a simple split-ergative language conditioned by tense/aspect, because the language shows a more complex case-marking pattern than previously described. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates that Nepali is a split-ergative language conditioned by the semantic nature of NPs. In the domain of inanimate NPs, the language is ergative; elsewhere, it resists classification as ergative or accusative. This finding is of typological significance in that it provides a good example for a rare split between inanimate NPs and animate NPs. Moreover, the paper argues that Nepali shows split intransitivity in terms of case marking, and it offers a semantic account of the split in terms of the interaction of two semantic factors, agentivity and telicity.

This paper discusses a class of grammatical A′-extractions from untensed verbal adjuncts in English, which appear to contradict the generalisation that adjuncts are islands. Two subclasses are presented, one of wh-extraction from secondary predicates modifying accomplishments, and one from secondary predicates modifying certain classes of achievements. In the accomplishment case, the event denoted by the secondary predicate is interpreted as the cause of the matrix event, whereas in the achievement case, it is interpreted as an event immediately preceding the matrix event. In the corresponding declaratives, on the other hand, aspectual restrictions on the matrix predicate, and the interpretation of the relation between the two events, are freer. This provides evidence for a generalisation that extraction is permitted from a secondary predicate only if the event denoted by that predicate is identified with an event position in the lexicosemantic representation of the matrix verb. This condition predicts further restrictions on the telicity of the two events, and the directness of the causal and/or temporal relations holding between the two events.

The aim of this study is to investigate the interaction betweenviewpoint aspect and argument realization. More specifically, we examine the correlation of +/� perfective verb forms in Greek and null objects with indefinite,non-specific interpretation.Itisarguedthatalthoughnullobjectsarepossiblewithbothperfective and imperfectiveverbs, imperfectiveverbs favour object omission more than perfectives. We claim that this is due to two reasons: first, that there is a difference in the syntactic representation of overt direct objects with perfective and imperfective verbs, which is associated with the notion of economy in their respective derivations, i.e. Merge as opposed to Merge + Move; secondly, that perfective verbs show an interpretive difference at the LF interface depending on the overt versus null nature of the direct object, whereas imperfectives do not. The difference is related to the semantic notion of telicity. This prediction has been tested in an off-line sentence-completion task with two groups of native speakers of Greek, an adult and a child group. The data revealed that native speakers of Greek preferred to use overt DP objects with perfective verbs more than with imperfectives. This finding is interpreted as showing that Aspect is a functional feature with an effect on argument realization. # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Icelandic has two auxiliary verbs, hafa ‘have’ and vera ‘be’, to express two types of perfectivity assigned to the sentence, which are called in this paper ‘experiential perfect’ and ‘perfect of result’. This paper seeks to explain the behavior of these auxiliaries from semantic and pragmatic perspectives with a special focus on vera. We argue that the most important factor in understanding the distinction between hafa and vera is that the perfect of result interpretation, encoded mostly in vera-sentences, arises in association with the speaker's different roles in speech events. We propose that the speaker is taken as a vantage point in the interpretation of vera-sentences and the resultant state is portrayed in accordance with his various involvements in the events. Properties of aspect such as telicity or the inferable eventual position of an entity, which have been proposed as key components in accounts of auxiliary selection, are shown to play no decisive role in Icelandic.

Tenny's Aspectual Interface Hypothesis (Tenny, C., 1994. Aspectual Roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Kluwer, Dordrecht) claims that aspectuality, especially telicity, is relevant to argument linking, but this claim does not account for the stative/dynamic contrast, which Tenny (1994) cannot explain. There is however evidence that the stative/dynamic contrast can be established over how semantic relations link to syntax. The claim that this aspectual contrast can be derived over the linking of semantic relations in turn accounts for the failure of the English verb SEE to be marked for an aspectuality, and for the aspectual polysemy of English verbs of appearance. The differences between these two verbs offers justification for Jackendoff's (Jackendorff, R.S., 1990. Semantic Structures. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) semantic tiering hypothesis and for a view of argument linking which treats it as an unmediated relationship between the semantic arguments of a verb and its syntactic valents.

The goal of this paper is to account for the observation that in a broad range of genetically unrelated languages we find two classes of direct objects based on their syntactic and semantic properties. Specifically, we find splits in object case marking, object position, or the ability of the object to trigger verb agreement. This split always correlates with specificity or definiteness of the object, and in a subset of languages it also correlates with delimitation or boundedness of the event. We propose that this split in object properties is determined by the presence or absence of a feature [Quantization] on the object DP. This feature, which formalizes Krifka's characterization of the countability of nominals and events, may also be present on either the verb or object agreement (Agr-O). The observed cross-linguistic variation is attributed to the language specific choice between these two heads as follows: When [Quant] is a feature of the verb, it is interpretable and independently encodes delimitation/boundedness of the event. However, when [Quant] is a feature of the functional head Agr, it is an uninterpretable feature which only enters into a checking relation with a definite/specific direct object.

The role of the co-verb ba in Mandarin Chinese has been one of the most frequently researched areas of investigation, previous analyses referring to notions such as disposal, definiteness, and high transitivity to describe its present grammatical status. However, historical accounts appear to give insufficient attention to the development of resultivity or telicity in the ba-complement. In order to explain these constraints, the present study offers an analysis of the ba-construction an instance of the grammaticalisation of causativity from lexical sources of dynamic possession (Heine, 1997). The possession-based analysis also explains the frequent substitution by gei in some dialects, and justifies the continued adherence to an SVO syntactic explanation.