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The question of the roles of grammatical aspect and of lexical aspect for the inference of temporal relations has richly been investigated from a theoretical point of view in various fields of languages sciences. Nevertheless, previous studies do not formulate similar conclusions, and thus they trigger different predictions for experimental testing. In contrast, the role of coreference patterns did not receive as much attention as grammatical and lexical aspect have received. As such, in this study we experimentally assess the roles of grammatical aspect (perfective vs. imperfective), lexical aspect (activities vs. accomplishments) and coreference patterns (same vs. different agents) in English. By means of an annotation study, we establish that fewer chronological relations emerge in passages with the imperfective aspect and coreference of agents (i.e. the actions are performed by the same agent). Then, by means of a temporal evaluation task, we show that synchronous relations are favoured in narrative passages that describe activities and lack of coreference of agents (i.e. the actions are performed by different agents). To interpret the results, we suggest that the comprehenders’ inference of temporal relations is influenced on the one hand by linguistic biases and on the other hand by their expectations of coherence. We discuss the findings from a cross-linguistic perspective.

This paper describes the aspectual classes in Abui, a Papuan language of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. Abui innovated a system of aspectual stem pairing, realized by consonant mutation, vowel grading, and rime mutation. Although stem pairing is widespread (about 61% of the verbs alternate), about 38% of our 1,330 verb sample are unpaired and immutable. Abui verbal stems combine with aspectual affixes, adverbs and auxiliary verbs, whose distribution is used here together with the stem types to describe aspectual classes, which are understood as lexicalizations of transitional possibilities of lexical items (e.g. inchoative-stative vs. inchoative-gradual.inchoative-stative). The paper takes the bidimensional approach to aspect distinguishing between properties associated with the perfective-imperfective system and other aspectual marking (cf. Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 2002. Recent activity in the theory of aspect: accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state? Linguistic Typology 6(2). 199–271). Combining the features of both types of aspectual marking, we construct in a bottom-up fashion the aspectual classes in Abui and also show that these may be further refined if contextual features such as valency or degree of change (affectedness) were included. A characteristic feature of the Abui system is the elaborate system of stative-inchoative verbs sensitive to scalar and change properties (e.g. instant vs. gradual). Abui telic verbs show sensitivity to the properties of the resulting state and are formally associated with stem alternation.

In this paper, I argue that mass deadjectival nominalizations like belleza ‘beauty’ encode imperfective states, which explains why they are compatible with temporal modifiers, but not with aspectual ones. In contrast to what is claimed in Fabregas & Marin (2012), this paper provides empirical evidence that Spanish nominalizations can encode not only information related to lexical aspect (i.e. (a)telicity), but also information related to viewpoint aspect (i.e. (im)perfectivity). My analysis is based on Anderson's & Morzycki's (2015) model on gradability, in which gradable adjectives express states and degrees are derived from state-kinds, which allows accounting for the properties of mass deadjectival nominalizations compositionally, insofar as they inherit the adjectival properties.

This paper offers a quantitative study of temporal reference in Mandarin using three translation corpora (French–Mandarin, Mandarin–French and English–Mandarin). We have systematically examined a series of overt linguistic factors (such as perfective and imperfective grammaticalized particles, temporal adverbs and adverbials) and non-linguistic factors (such as lexical aspect and the Bounded Event Constraint, the latter argued to be a universal pragmatic principle) which current research suggests are responsible for expressing temporal reference in Mandarin. We used methods from the field of corpus linguistics, such as translational spotting, data coding (when no metalinguistic judgement is necessary) and data annotation (when a metalinguistic judgement is required). Our quantitative analyses indicate that, contrary to what is predicted by non-empirical studies, aspectual particles are infrequent and their role in expressing temporal reference is questionable. In contrast, temporal adverbs and adverbials play a significant role in expressing reference to past and future time, whereas linguistically non-marked situations are most frequently located in the present. In accordance with the Bounded Event Constraint, the lexical aspect of situations is central to the determination of temporal reference: events are largely located in the past, and states in the present. These results are interpreted in a relevance-theoretic model of temporal reference, according to which hearers treat temporal information coming from various cues in a cognitively coherent manner. A series of differences has been found regarding the role of the factors examined for Mandarin as a source and as a target language, partially supporting the assumption of translation universals.

In this article we explore the range of aspectual and quantificational readings that are available to two kinds of deverbal nominalizations in English, conversion nouns and -ing nominals. Using data gathered from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC), we examine the range of readings available for the conversion and -ing forms of 106 English verbs in context. We distinguish eventive versus referential readings, looking at instances of both count and mass quantification for the two kinds of nominalizations. Within the eventive readings we also distinguish bounded versus unbounded aspectual readings, and within bounded readings two types that we call ‘completive’ and ‘package’. We argue that the quantificational properties and aspectual intepretation of both conversion and -ing nominalizations are not rigidly or even loosely determined by the form of the nominalization, but that the lexical aspect of the base verb (state, activity, accomplishment, achievement, semelfactive) plays some role in circumscribing aspectual readings. We argue that the strongest role in determining quantificational and aspectual readings is played by factors arising from the context in which conversion forms and -ing nominalizations are deployed. The aspectual interpretation of conversion and -ing nominalizations can be influenced by the presence of temporal and quantificational modifiers, by surrounding tenses, as well as by encyclopedic knowledge. We conclude with a consideration of the theoretical implications of our findings.

The article is devoted to the specificity of translating terms from scientific and technical articles on Computer Technology from Ukrainian into English. The results of the paper discover that the most frequent translation operation is a corresponding term. Less frequent transformations are concretization and generalization. The translator’s goal is to produce a target text that would convey the same information as conveyed by the ST; the amount of the communicatively relevant information in the TT must be the same as in the ST. If the goal is achieved, the communicative effect produced by the TT is equal to that of the ST.

Various explanations have been put forth for the asymmetrical acquisition of tense and aspect morphology across categories of lexical aspect. This experiment tested the adequacy of a subset of such accounts by examining English native speakers’ ( n = 40) use of progressive and past tense morphology within activity and accomplishment verb frames during their early acquisition of a miniature artificial language. Participants completed a lesson in which types and tokens of lexical aspect and past and present morphology were balanced. Although significant effects at p < .05 were found for lexical aspect and morphological marking, the interaction between these factors, expected by the aspect hypothesis, was non-significant. The experiment suggests that the effects of lexical aspect may be absent during the earliest phases of second language acquisition or may be due to factors methodologically excluded in this study such as distributional biases in second language input.

Research on creole tense–mood–aspect (TMA) systems began in earnest as a response to Bickerton's claim that there was a prototypical system shaped by a language bioprogram. This article presents an overview of such research, as well as a comparison of TMA systems across creoles of different lexical affiliations. A growing body of research in the last 20 years has employed typological and semantic frameworks to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of creole TMA systems. Creoles employ rich inventories of temporal and modal categories whose core meanings interact with the discourse context to produce different interpretations. The syntax of creole TMA also closely follows the universal hierarchy of functional heads proposed by Cinque. The emergence and development of the TMA categories themselves follow general principles of internally and externally motivated change.

The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008) assumes functional morphology to be a particular challenge in second language (L2) acquisition whereas acquisition of syntax and semantics to be unproblematic. I propose, following Polinsky (2011), that functional morphology can be seen as an acquisitional bottleneck for heritage language (hl) speakers as well. Russian verbal aspect is known to be problematic in bilingual Russian children (Anstatt, 2008; Gupol, 2009), in adult foreign language learners (Slabakova, 2005, Nossalik, 2009) and in Russian heritage speakers of low (Polinsky, 2008) and even near-native fluency (Laleko, 2010). This comprehension study tested fluent and literate English dominant hl speakers of Russian on their interpretation of lexical and grammatical aspect. The findings suggest that the semantics and syntax of aspect were unproblematic, but aspectual morphology played both a facilitative and a hindering role in the comprehension of aspectual distinctions. In the untimed Semantic Entailments task, where participants chose the most logical continuation of an utterance, the morphological complexity of secondary imperfectives coupled with their semantic complexity, hindered hl interpretations. In contrast, in the Stop-Making-Sense self-paced reading task, in which participants read sentences one word at a time, the idiosyncratic morphology marking lexical aspect hindered hl processing, while the regular mechanism of marking grammatical aspect facilitated it.

This is a study of the collocation of Chinese verbs with different lexical aspects and aspect markers. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we explored the processing of aspect violation sentences. In the experiment, we combined verbs of various lexical aspect types with the progressive aspect marker zhe, and the combination of the achievement verbs and the progressive aspect marker zhe constituted the sentence’s aspect violation. The participants needed to judge whether a sentence was correct after it was presented. Finally, we observed and analyzed the components of ERPs. The results suggest that when the collocation of aspect markers and lexical aspect is ungrammatical, the N400-like and P600 are elicited on aspect markers, while the late AN is elicited by the word after the aspect marker. P600 and N400-like show that the collocation of Chinese verbs with various lexical aspects and aspect markers involve not only syntactic processing, but also the semantic processing, and the late AN may have been due to the syntax revision and the conclusion at the end of sentences.

Some long-standing questions surrounding anticausatives in languages like French include whether the morphological marking (presence/absence of se) correlates with interpretational differences and/or different syntax. We examine the three anticausatives classes (optional se, obligatory se, no se) in three aspectual contexts and formulate a generalization whereby a default morphological form (reflexive-/non-reflexive-marked) can be identified for each context, plus an interpretive anti-blocking effect: if the lexicon does not provide the default form then the other form (regardless of morphology) preserves the aspectual interpretation of its transitive source. French anticausative se is tied to lexical aspect (rather than syntax), but the distribution is complex and non-transparent. We argue that the grammar allows bidirectional competition among forms and interpretations and the formalize analysis in Bidirectional OT (Superoptimality).

The verbal root in Tima may be marked for one or several derivational functions, such as transitive, ventive, antipassive, middle voice, causative, instrumental, or pluractionality. Contrary to other derivational devices, pluractional marking can be achieved by various formal strategies, which are described in detail in the present contribution. Pluractional marking on Tima verbs indicates only repeated action or duration, depending on the lexical aspect of the verb; the number of the subject or object does not interfere with the marking. However, certain constructions force the speaker to use the pluractional as default form; the focus is on the action itself in such constructions.

The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and telic vs. atelic events, can be modelled effectively with distributional semantics. We find that a verb's local context is most indicative of its aspectual class, and demonstrate that closed class words tend to be stronger discriminating contexts than content words. Our approach outperforms previous work on three datasets. Lastly, we contribute a dataset of human--human conversations annotated with lexical aspect and present experiments that show the correlation of telicity with genre and discourse goals., Comment: to appear at Coling 2020 in oh so lovely virtual Barcelona :)

The present study sets out to analyze aspectuality and coercion in Persian from a new perspective. With regard to the transcendental aspectual distinction between perfectivity, characterized by boundedness and heterogeneity, and imperfectivity, specified by uniformity and homogeneity (Langacker, 2008), it is argued that the heterogeneity of verbs may be assessed according to their phasic and episodic variables. In other words, in contrast to homogeneous verbs, which lack any kind of boundedness, heterogeneous verbs may occur either in a bounded phasic domain or in a bounded episodic domain. Concerning phasic-episodic features, this study presents a new model of lexical aspect that can differentiate five aspectual categories. The paper also scrutinizes the combinations of different verbs with different sentential operators in order to explain various kinds of type-shifting triggered by different operators. Thereby, two procedures of phasic coercion and episodic coercion are introduced which are responsible for modifying the phasic and episodic features of verbs in order to resolve the semantic conflicts between verbs and sentential operators. These procedures modify the phasic/episodic attributes of verbs according to the viewing frames evoked by interpretative operators.

This paper reports the results of the first experiment dealing with the challenges of building a machine translation system for user-generated content involving a complex South Slavic language. We focus on translation of English IMDb user movie reviews into Serbian, in a low-resource scenario. We explore potentials and limits of (i) phrase-based and neural machine translation systems trained on out-of-domain clean parallel data from news articles (ii) creating additional synthetic in-domain parallel corpus by machine-translating the English IMDb corpus into Serbian. Our main findings are that morphology and syntax are better handled by the neural approach than by the phrase-based approach even in this low-resource mismatched domain scenario, however the situation is different for the lexical aspect, especially for person names. This finding also indicates that in general, machine translation of person names into Slavic languages (especially those which require/allow transcription) should be investigated more systematically.

We study verbs in image–text corpora, contrasting caption corpora, where texts are explicitly written to characterize image content, with depiction corpora, where texts and images may stand in more general relations. Captions show a distinctively limited distribution of verbs, with strong preferences for specific tense, aspect, lexical aspect, and semantic field. These limitations, which appear in data elicited by a range of methods, restrict the utility of caption corpora to inform image retrieval, multimodal document generation, and perceptually-grounded semantic models. We suggest that these limitations reflect the discourse constraints in play when subjects write texts to accompany imagery, so we argue that future development of image–text corpora should work to increase the diversity of event descriptions, while looking explicitly at the different ways text and imagery can be coherently related.

This paper details the development of a linguistic resource designed to improve temporal information extraction systems and to integrate aspectual values. After a brief review of recent works in temporal information extraction for the medical area, we discuss the linguistic notion of aspect and how it got a place in the NLP field. Then, we present our clinical data and describe the five-step approach adopted in this study. Finally, we represent the linguistic resource itself and explain how we elaborated it and which properties were selected for the creation of the tables.

It is believed that Classical Chinese, though without grammatical category of aspect, has the lexical aspect. This chapter proposes that verbs in Classical Chinese contain semantic components related to aspectual meaning and the lack of morphological means is compensated by the rich contents of lexical words. It is argued, in discussing aspect, it is necessary to distinguish between the lexical level and the verb-phrase level. This chapter first probes into the aspectual features of motion verbs in Classical Chinese. The verbs of ascend-descend, transfer and passing are discussed based on the comparison of completeness and incompleteness of event structure. Then verbs of arrival and traversal are taken as examples to illustrate the interaction of aspectual features and situation types. Aspectual feature, the basis of situation type, is regarded as the intrinsic and constant property of verb meaning while situation type, co-determined by the verb and its context, is dynamic and changeable.

Compound and complex predicates—predicates that consist of two or more lexical items and function as the predicate of a single sentence—present an important class of linguistic objects that pertain to an enormously wide range of issues in the interactions of morphology, phonology, syntax, and semantics. Japanese makes extensive use of compounding to expand a single verb into a complex one. These compounding processes range over multiple modules of the grammatical system, thus straddling the borders between morphology, syntax, phonology, and semantics. In terms of degree of phonological integration, two types of compound predicates can be distinguished. In the first type, called tight compound predicates, two elements from the native lexical stratum are tightly fused and inflect as a whole for tense. In this group, Verb-Verb compound verbs such as arai-nagasu [wash-let.flow] ‘to wash away’ and hare-agaru [sky.be.clear-go.up] ‘for the sky to clear up entirely’ are preponderant in numbers and productivity over Noun-Verb compound verbs such as tema-doru [time-take] ‘to take a lot of time (to finish).’ The second type, called loose compound predicates, takes the form of “Noun + Predicate (Verbal Noun [VN] or Adjectival Noun [AN]),” as in post-syntactic compounds like [sinsya : koonyuu] no okyakusama ([new.car : purchase] GEN customers) ‘customer(s) who purchase(d) a new car,’ where the symbol “:” stands for a short phonological break. Remarkably, loose compounding allows combinations of a transitive VN with its agent subject (external argument), as in [Supirubaagu : seisaku] no eiga ([Spielberg : produce] GEN film) ‘a film/films that Spielberg produces/produced’—a pattern that is illegitimate in tight compounds and has in fact been considered universally impossible in the world’s languages in verbal compounding and noun incorporation. In addition to a huge variety of tight and loose compound predicates, Japanese has an additional class of syntactic constructions that as a whole function as complex predicates. Typical examples are the light verb construction, where a clause headed by a VN is followed by the light verb suru ‘do,’ as in Tomodati wa sinsya o koonyuu (sae) sita [friend TOP new.car ACC purchase (even) did] ‘My friend (even) bought a new car’ and the human physical attribute construction, as in Sensei wa aoi me o site-iru [teacher TOP blue eye ACC do-ing] ‘My teacher has blue eyes.’ In these constructions, the nominal phrases immediately preceding the verb suru are semantically characterized as indefinite and non-referential and reject syntactic operations such as movement and deletion. The semantic indefiniteness and syntactic immobility of the NPs involved are also observed with a construction composed of a human subject and the verb aru ‘be,’ as Gakkai ni wa oozei no sankasya ga atta ‘There was a large number of participants at the conference.’ The constellation of such “word-like” properties shared by these compound and complex predicates poses challenging problems for current theories of morphology-syntax-semantics interactions with regard to such topics as lexical integrity, morphological compounding, syntactic incorporation, semantic incorporation, pseudo-incorporation, and indefinite/non-referential NPs.

In this work we assume that the human mind cannot perceive time directly and thus resorts to a metaphor of space in order to conceptualize it (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Gentner et al., 2002; Merrit et al., 2010). We argue that time, which is conceptualized in terms of a path image schema, is needed along with spatial coordinates in order to locate a proposition in a possible world so that it can receive a truth-value. In other words, both time and space are needed to evaluate a proposition. The human mind codifies the temporal properties of a proposition by means of three systems, which are based upon Reichenbach's (1947) temporal variables, namely speech time, evaluation time and utterance time: tense, which locates an event or situation along the temporal path image schema (past, present or future); aspect, which represents the speaker's viewpoint of the event or situation conveyed in the utterance (perfectivity and progressivity, among others); and lexical aspect or aktionsart, which encodes the temporal properties of the event or situation itself (i.e. whether it is bound, unbound, or punctual). Specifically, we provide a mathematical model that represents the information codified by these three systems by means of a Euclidean vector (a geometric entity characterized by a magnitude, which in our case is a number times an abstract temporal unit) in a four-dimensional-like mental representation, namely an R3 +ˆt mental representation: a three dimensional space (R3 ) defined by three versors (a vector whose magnitude equals one unit and defines a line), xˆ, yˆ and zˆ plus a fourth versor ˆt that defines the temporal path image schema along which the proposition must be placed in order to receive a truth value. Ultimately, this work aims to offer a novel account of tense using theoretical tools from cognitive linguistics and formal logic, as well as mathematical formalisms, which will allow us to carry out the computational implementation of the model in NLP systems

This paper presents a semantic analysis of the perfect aspect in Niuean (Polynesian). We argue based on novel data that the Niuean perfect shares many properties with the English perfect, but also several striking differences. The Niuean perfect disallows universal perfect readings, can induce inchoative readings, and with some event-types allows present in-progress readings. We analyze the Niuean perfect as introducing inchoative semantics: it adds an initial change-of-state to the predicate to which it attaches, and places that change-of-state inside the Perfect Time Span. Our findings cast doubt on a model of grammar whereby lexical aspectual operations such as inchoativization are strictly separated from viewpoint aspectual operations such as the perfect. We argue for a flexible approach whereby different components of meaning (inchoativity, a Perfect Time Span restriction, current relevance effects) can be introduced at different levels and combined in different ways by languages to produce surface cross-linguistic variation.

In this study, the effectiveness of implicit corrective feedback was examined with a group of 30 sixteen-year-old English native speakers learning French, who received either recasts or clarification requests on errors they made with the passé composé and the imparfait. The control group did not receive any feedback. Overall, the results indicate that recasts were more effective in improving accuracy of form and use for both the passé composé and the imparfait. However, an examination of language development with reference to the Aspect Hypothesis and the inherent lexical aspect of verbs showed that no change occurred between the pretest and the posttests. The passé composé was associated exclusively with achievement verbs, whereas the imparfait was limited to several frequent irregular stative verbs and a few activity verbs.

This paper reports a cross-linguistic study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in an aspect language (Russian) and a non-aspect language (German). In Russian, mereological semantics led us to expect incremental mismatch detection independently of the presence or absence of the verbal arguments. In German, however, mismatch effects should be delayed until the processor has encountered the complete predication. These predictions were tested in two eyetracking during reading experiments. We investigated the processing of achievement verbs modified by aspectually mismatching adverbials in Russian (Exp. 1) and German (Exp. 2) and manipulated the word order in such a way that the mismatch occurred before or after the predication was complete. The data show that Russian readers immediately noticed the mismatch independently of whether the verb preceded or followed its arguments, whereas German readers showed mismatch effects only after a complete predication. We take this as evidence for cross-lingui...

This paper offers a unified approach to Italian spatial prepositions, such as di fronte a ‘in front of’, verso ‘towards’, in ‘in’, dietro a ‘behind’, and nel mezzo di ‘in the middle of’. Three assumptions play a key role. First, Italian spatial prepositions can differ sensibly in their morphological structure, but share the same syntactic properties. Second, their sentential distribution is in part context-sensitive, thus based on the categories with which they combine. Third, their semantic contribution is “layered”, in the sense that it includes the meaning dimensions of both aspectual boundedness and specificity. The main result is a generalised theory on the structure and semantic interpretation of these prepositions.

This paper argues against the assumption that Spanish-and more generally Romance-imperfective past (IMP) is an intrinsically anaphoric tense. It is a widely accepted view that IMP requires a temporal discourse antecedent to be licensed. My aim is to show that such requirement is not actually in force when IMP combines with a stative/atelic predicate. In fact, with stative/atelic predicates, IMP (a) is acceptable in isolated sentences with no suitable antecedent available, (b) is able to access implicit assumptions that are not available with telic predicates-but do not behave as real antecedents, and (c) does not trigger certain perspectivisation effects that depend on the existence of a temporal antecedent. As a result, an asymmetry arises between continuous and habitual interpretations of IMP, which do not require retrieving a temporal antecedent, and progressive and narrative interpretations, which do need an accessible antecedent. Thus, the relevance of a discourse antecedent varies according to the lexical aspect of the predicate and the corresponding interpretations, and the alleged anaphoric nature of IMP cannot be a feature of its semantics: it is rather pragmatically derived from imperfectivity.

Aspectual modifiers that have adverbial and adjectival counterparts are an important source of information for researching lexical aspect in the nominal domain. One class of such modifiers are adverbs of completeness (completamente 'completely', totalmente 'totally'), which are maximizers when modify adjectives, and their correspondent adjectives (completo 'complete', total 'total'). This paper addresses the inheritance of aspectual features and its relation to degree in event nominalizations of incremental theme verbs (traduccción 'translation', destrucción 'destruction') through the analysis modification by adjectives of completeness in Spanish. The proposal combines a syntactic account of deverbal nominalizations with a scalar approach to aspect. Adjectives of completeness are argued to be aspectual modifiers, with a contribution equivalent to that of their adverbial counterparts both in the verbal and in the adjectival domain, establishing thus a parallelism between degree modification of adjectives, verbs and nominals.

This study argues that in Pazar Laz, all verb types have a transitive syntax involving both an initiator and an undergoer. Thus, there are no truly intransitive verbs, such as unaccusatives and unergatives. All eventualities are argued to involve a relationship between an initiator and an undergoer and are strictly mapped onto syntax transitively in Pazar Laz.

Two empirical studies – a verb elicitation experiment and a collostructional analysis – were conducted to investigate the Mandarin LVS construction with respect to the lexical semantics of the verb and its collocation with grammatical aspect. Converging evidence from both studies indicates strong schematicity and productivity in the verb category of the LVS construction. Although most exemplars fall into a few major lexical semantic clusters, there are more low-frequency marginal exemplars than previously recognized, reinforcing the constructional schema in an essentially radial category. In addition to the lexical semantic regularity of the verb slot, both studies showed the existence of high-frequency tokens with prototype status. As far as grammatical aspect is concerned, the converging evidence indicates that the LVS category is compatible not only with the durative aspect, but also with the perfective as well as the resultative and directional lexical aspect. The attraction of grammatical aspect to the verb of LVS is graded rather than absolute, with some mutual selection patterns more typical than others. The two grammatical aspects as marked by the durative -zhe and the perfective -le are non-interchangeable.

The paper is devoted to analysis of spatial lexical units in the novel of D.M. Glukhovsky “Metro 2033”. The lexical units which reveal the space in the text, in this case prosaic, have been classified and described by the authors. The lexical and cultural analysis of spatial lexical units related to one novel of literary project «Metro 2033» has been conducted in this study.

Taking as a starting point the fact that a lacuna is a specific linguistic phenomenon that many researchers have been interested in, mainly for its basic lexical aspect as well as its phraseological-paremiological, stylistic and lexicographic aspects, we would especially like to emphasize the problems in translation that it causes as such when related or non-related languages are in contact. As a result, there is the need for thorough analysis of translation procedures for translating a lacuna, the overview of which we have tried to compose relying on already existing methods in translation, through the prism of Russian and Serbian linguistic literature.

This article presents the verbal suffix -ite in Totela (Bantu, Namibia and Zambia), which has variable temporal interpretations based both on lexical aspect (situation type) and on discourse context. The same -ite-marked predicate may be interpreted as referencing a situation that is past (resultative-like readings) or present (progressive-like readings) with respect to utterance time. The suffix is analyzed as having the aspectual function of a stativizer, asserting a relevant property of the utterance's subject. Temporal interpretations with respect to utterance time (or other perspective time) are derived from principles of relevance: the state described by an -ite-marked predicate is interpreted so that it answer the current question under discussion in discourse. The -ite suffix, most likely related to a historical resultative, still specifies a result state, but the temporal specifications of that result state are weakened and must be inferred through context. Cross-linguistic comparison of -ite with other markers that have both perfect/resultative and progressive readings suggests that the pragmatic notion of relevance ⿿ and not only commonalities in temporal semantics (e.g. focus on post-state; stativizing functions) ⿿ may be a key factor in the perfect/resultative/progressive connection.

The present study addresses a learnability problem in the acquisition of English progressive aspect by Korean learners of English. As Korean and...

Many Northeastern Neo-Aramaic languages have two distinct strategies for marking perfective aspect, both morphosyntactically restricted in different ways. The canonical perfective strategy – the perfective verb base – typically bans certain types of objects, while the secondary perfective strategy – the imperfective verb base bearing the perfective prefix qam- – requires a certain type of object. This paper deals mainly with the secondary perfective strategy, attempting to understand and formally characterize its distribution and structure. While this phenomenon is well-known in the descriptive and historical literature (see Coghill 1999 and references therein), it has never before received theoretical treatment. I argue that qam- is a high perfective aspect marker analogous to certain so-called “superlexical” prefixes in Slavic languages, which have a perfectivizing function and select for an imperfective stem (Babko-Malaya 1999; 2003; Ramchand 2004; Romanova 2004; Tatevosov 2008; Gribanova 2013; i.a.). Slavic-like stacking of high aspects is thus shown to exist in languages that lack a corresponding system of rich lexical aspect (cf. the Slavic “lexical” prefixes). The secondary perfective in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic also illuminates another cross-linguistic pattern: apparent temporal or aspectual mismatches between the clause level and the verb-stem/base level, like those found in Indo-Iranian languages (Haig 2008), need not imply that the verb bases/stems lack tense and aspect. Finally, I show that the secondary perfective furnishes a new type of argument for the syntactic nature of φ-agreement.

Expression of time is an important field in linguistic research. In Lithuanian linguistics, the study of time has focused first and foremost on tense and aspect systems. Therefore, Lithuanian language has developed a big diversity of means to encode time, e.g. noun cases ( vasarą ‘in summer’) and noun phrases ( liepos vakarą ‘in July evening’), prepositional phrases ( po darbo ‘after work’), adverbs ( netrukus ‘soon’), subordinate clauses ( kai nustos lyti ‘when it stops raining’). All of them despite their different grammatical status are suggested to be called temporal adverbials. ‘Adverbial’ is a quite new notion in Lithuanian linguistics, it was first presented in the studies of stance adverbials but is also convenient in the field of linguistic expression of time. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing a semantic-functional class of temporal adverbials in Lithuanian linguistics and to show their position in the system of means that encode time. The second part of the paper presents a few semantic models of the temporal adverbials made by foreign linguists and the semantic research of Lithuanian temporal means that should be regarded as temporal adverbials. Keywords: linguistic expression of time; temporal adverbial; adverb; tense; aspect; lexical aspect; deixis of time DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/Lietkalb.2016.10.9923

The temporality of a given situation ‘out there in the world’ can be described in many ways. Tense and aspect offer the essential parameters. Lexical aspect characterizes event descriptions; a situation with a sleeping child can be referred to as a state of affairs (be asleep) or as a happening (sleep, wake up). Grammatical aspect imposes a perspective by focusing a particular time slice of a situation, such as the ongoing process (the baby was sleeping, mom was waking up the baby), the event as a whole (the baby slept, mom woke up the baby), or the resulting state (the baby has slept, mom has woken the baby up). Tense locates a situation at a certain time (was sleeping, is sleeping, will sleep). Temporality is thus determined by the three grammatical notions of lexical aspect, grammatical aspect and tense. Tense anchors the time of an event vis-a-vis a reference time, often the moment of speech. Aspect imposes one or more layers of temporal structure on the event time thus defining its temporal properties. Lexical aspect (also called “situation type”, “inner aspect”, “Aktionsart”) characterizes the temporal contour, while grammatical aspect (or “viewpoint aspect”) determines the temporal viewpoint on the run-time of the event. The grammatical expression of aspect varies enormously: while there are languages with one, a few or many types of aspectual markers, other languages have no dedicated aspect markers whatsoever. In some languages tense and aspect morphology is conflated. This crosslinguistic variation makes aspect an interesting domain of linguistic investigation and a wide variety of acquisition studies have investigated aspect development in children, raising questions about its universal versus language-specific properties. In this chapter I review the acquisition literature of lexical and grammatical aspect; tense is beyond its scope. Section 2 summarizes the fundamental generalizations and linguistic analyses of the two types of aspect, and presents the cross-linguistic variation in aspect expression which leads to issues of learnability. Section 3 presents the acquisition literature for lexical aspect, and section 4 does the same for grammatical aspect. Section 5 draws conclusions about the coverage of aspect acquisition research to date and presents an outlook on novel directions of research.

Thinking and speaking about events is a process tightly connected with time perception. We can express when an event has occurred with respect to other events, whether it was a durative or a one-time event, whether it was an ongoing or already finished event, etc. Every human language has its own way and extent to which this complex temporal structure of experienced events is expressed. Upon hearing a story we construct a mental representation of the communicated event (e.g. Givón 1992). Some studies show that this construction already evolves during online processing, thanks to instantly accessible language processing cues (Altman and Kamide 1999, Ferretti, McRae and Hatherell 2001, McRae, Ferretti and Amyote 1997). These cues are employed to capture the intricate temporal structure of the story, for instance. They arise from the interplay of the three basic linguistic components (structure, meaning and function) and as such are consistent with a constructional view of language (e.g. Fillmore 1988). Even subtle changes of any of the linguistic cues may lead to a different mental representation. Examples of the sources of grammatical markers and lexical categories from which the linguistic cues arise are grammatical and lexical aspect. In the linguistic field, a lot of attention has been paid to analyses of how those sources of temporal cues function within a language system. However, there is a lack of empirical data on how grammatical and lexical aspect interact, and what the effects of such an interaction are. The present study aims to investigate the link between the complex system of temporal cues and sensorimotor representation in Czech speakers, with specific focus on grammatical verb aspect and so-called event telicity, i.e. lexical aspect, all of which will be further described below.

This paper proposes a method for improving the results of a statistical Machine Translation system using boundedness , a pragmatic component of the verbal phrase’s lexical aspect. First, the paper presents manual and automatic annotation experiments for lexical aspect in English-French parallel corpora. It will be shown that this aspectual property is identified and classified with ease both by humans and by automatic systems. Second, Statistical Machine Translation experiments using the boundedness annotations are presented. These experiments show that the information regarding lexical aspect is useful to improve the output of a Machine Translation system in terms of better choices of verbal tenses in the target language, as well as better lexical choices. Ultimately, this work aims at providing a method for the automatic annotation of data with boundedness information and at contributing to the domain interested on the linguistic aspects of Machine Translation.

Presented here is an analysis of the effect of the Koine Greek preverb eis- on the lexical aspect of the Koine verb erchomai 'go/come'. To determine the effect of eis-, I demonstrate the lexical aspect of the simplex erchomai and its prefixed form eis-erchomai by annotating all instances of both verbs in the Greek New Testament. Methodology for determining the lexical aspect of the two verbs is adapted from methodology used for languages in which native speaker intuitions are accessible. Applying some of these tests to the corpora, I conclude that erchomai is an activity verb and eiserchomai is a telic verb. This result confirms Buist Fanning's (1990) classification of the same verbs, though he used different methodology to come to this conclusion. Additional ways of developing aktionsart tests for corpora are suggested.

Most previous approaches to the acquisition of morphology have focused on the acquisition of inflectional morphology of some Indo-European language; there are fewer studies on the acquisition of languages with a rich morphological system, in-cluding the Finno-Ugric languages. Among the Finno-Ugric languages the acquisition of Estonian has been a largely neglected area. The article discusses the impact of the typological peculiarity of a language on the acquisition of the inflectional morphology of Estonian. At first some assumptions will be made concerning the impact of the general richness of the Estonian morphological system on the speed of the acquisition of inflectional morphology followed by the analyses of the acquisition of individual typologically relevant features. The article discusses the acquisition of inflectional and analytic means of expression, the acquisition of gradation as a typologically relevant feature of Estonian, the acquisition of the lexical aspect of Estonian, and the acquisition of the case of the object as the principal means of expressing the aspect. The conclusions are based on the data from the previous articles by the author and the Estonian subcorpus of Vija, Argus, and Triplets in CHILDES.

Argumentative texts have been thoroughly analyzed for their argumentative structure, and recent efforts aim at their automatic classification. This work investigates linguistic properties of argumentative texts and text passages in terms of their semantic clause types. We annotate argumentative texts with Situation Entity (SE) classes, which combine notions from lexical aspect (states, events) with genericity and habituality of clauses. We analyse the correlation of SE classes with argumentative text genres, components of argument structures, and some functions of those components. Our analysis reveals interesting relations between the distribution of SE types and the argumentative text genre, compared to other genres like fiction or report. We also see tendencies in the correlations between argument components (such as premises and conclusions) and SE types, as well as between argumentative functions (such as support and rebuttal) and SE types. The observed tendencies can be deployed for automatic recognition and fine-grained classification of argumentative text passages.

This paper stems from a broader research project entitled Analog-based Modelling of Meaning Representations in English (Skrzypczak 2006), and aims to present grammatical aspect and lexical aspect as two modes of encoding the temporal profiles within the conceptualisation of processes (terminologically, in Langackerian sense, imperfective and perfective processes, otherwise, variously labelled as stative and dynamic verbs, i. e. states vs. discrete ‘unitary’ events and nondiscrete ‘unbounded’ processes). It is assumed that aspect in both cases – as a process-profiling category – is analogous to the profiling of things and atemporal relations (in the sense of Langacker 1987, 1990, 2000), given the maximisation of the temporal domain in the characterisation of processes (perfective and imperfective, hence: dynamic and stative), and minimalisation of the temporal domain during the conceptualisation of things (conceptually independent entities) and atemporal relations (conceptually dependent atemporal configurations). The analogy between nouns and verbs in terms of ‘granularity’ has been so far variously addressed by Langacker (1990), Jackendoff (1991) and Talmy (2001), and also constitutes the core assumption in my research on topological modelling.

While the nature of productive lexical knowledge may be distinguished as competence-based or performance-based, classification of lexical problems in the translating phase is lacking in the writing strategies literature. With separate interest in competence-based word knowledge, this study investigates the lexical aspect of the writing process by exploring the types and tokens of lexical problems that L2 writers identify in the drafting (translating) stage of writing. To obtain data, 10 Korean university students were asked to think-aloud while writing twice in English on word processors with access to Internet dictionaries. A repeated measures design was used where students wrote for two audiences and two writing topics. Three main types of lexical competence problems were found where use of the Internet dictionary had an effect on the identification of problems. Signs of vocabulary problems indicated that writers had unknown word, partially known word, and more than one word problems where eight subcategories of partially known word problems were found. The findings may provide pedagogical implications for helping L2 writers solve different types of lexical problems such as in contexts where word processors and Internet dictionaries are used as the medium.