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This paper examines Hausa verbal compounds in terms of the division of regular verbs (verbs in the "grade system") into verbs which have a High or Low tone first syllable. The focus of the paper is the surprisingly small number of transitive L-verbs (verbs beginning with a Low tone - "grade 2") and their limited use of compound markers which contrasts strongly with the frequency of transitive H-verbs (verbs beginning with a High tone) and their markers. I also describe several devices (e.g. grade-switching and covert subjects) which "allow" the formation of verbal compounds with transitive L-verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Verbal systems can give prominence to tense, aspect, or mood. The morphology of the verbal system within biblical Greek provides important evidence to suggest that Greek is an aspect-prominent language, though one that also incorporates tense within the indicative mood. Certain traditional grammatical labels inappropriately treat Greek as though it were instead a tense-prominent language like English (e.g. the use of "present" or "tense formative" outside of the indicative mood). We need to reform our descriptive labels and general conception of Greek accordingly. In doing so, the simplicity and beauty of the Greek verbal system emerges, offering pedagogical advantages for teachers of Greek and challenging exegetes to properly account for Greek's particular configuration of tense, aspect, and mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Chinese Linguistics is the property of Chinese University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The verb ἔχω has two future formations, ἕξω and σχήσω. Opinion is divided, however, as to whether there is any semantic difference between them. In the view of some, ἕξω shows imperfective aspect (‘will have, keep’), σχήσω perfective aspect (‘will hold back, prevent’). Others deny that any such aspectual distinction can be drawn, pointing to passages where the supposedly aoristic σχήσω is clearly durative. Examination of the evidence from seven authors reveals that, despite the decline of the (-)σχησ- future, the two forms are nearly always used in distinct ways, which can often be characterized as aspectual. First, the (-)σχησ- future is used more often of telic events. Second, it is preferred when the verb has the meaning ‘prevent’, especially when it has a prepositional prefix; as this sense shows higher transitivity than the ‘have’ semantics of the (-)ἑξ- future, it is reasonable to associate it with the perfective aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Nebrija de Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza de Lenguas is the property of Revista Nebrija de Linguistica Aplicada a la Ensenanza de Lenguas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

How does grammar represent simultaneity? More precisely, how do grammatical representations of sentences indicate that two events or situations are located at the same time? This is a question of central importance for the theory of tense and aspect, and one to which Hamida Demirdache and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria (Nat. Lang. Linguist. Theory, doi:, ) (D&UE) propose some provocative new answers. Their empirical focus is the semantics of perfective, imperfective, and progressive aspect in French and Spanish, with special attention to the temporal semantics of modal verbs, but their account has broader implications for the theory of simultaneous time reference and the imperfective/perfective distinction in general. In these remarks, I discuss certain implications of their main proposal and its implementation. Specifically, I examine their idea that the principal semantic distinction between perfective and imperfective viewpoint aspect involves a contrast between coreference or covaluation (with perfective aspect) and semantic binding (with imperfective aspect). D&UE assume that the perfective/imperfective contrast is aspectual, and structurally parallel to perfect and progressive aspect; they implement the coreference versus binding distinction in terms of the relation between two aspectual time coordinates (the Assertion Time and the Event Time). I point out some problems that arise under these assumptions, and propose an alternative implementation of the coreference versus binding distinction at the higher level of tense. I then explore empirical implications of this approach for perfective versus imperfective tenses in ellipsis contexts, involving strict versus sloppy identity in temporal reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tense is traditionally assumed to express temporal relations between the time of the event and the moment of speech, whereas aspect expresses various views on one and the same event. In Klein (), it was argued that the intuitions which underlie this viewing metaphor can be made precise by a time-relational analysis as well. In his article 'Aspect vs. relative tense: the case reopened', Jürgen Bohnemeyer challenges one important point of this analysis, the equation of aspect and relative tense in the English perfect and in temporal forms of few other languages. In the present comment, it is argued that this is indeed a simplification, which does not speak, however, against a time-relational analysis of aspect in general. The main lines of such an analysis for the English perfect are sketched. It is shown that it naturally accounts for differences between the simple past and the present perfect, as well as for the oddity of constructions such as Einstein has visited Princeton or Ira has left yesterday at five. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perfect tense-form verb ἀναβέβηκεν in John 3.13 is usually interpreted in light of traditional verb theory, as a ‘past action with present results’. This interpretation introduces an apparent problematic chronology in that the Son of Man ascends before descending; however, recent developments in Greek grammar, particularly verbal aspect theory, provide a viable solution to this grammatical ‘problem’ and indicate that the Son of Man's descent precedes his ascent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present study addresses a novel proposal on the categorization and description of the modal features in estar por + infinitive and estar para + infinitive, both of which have been analyzed as aspect perisphrastic constructions in the near past. This characterization embraces their prototypical meanings along with the epistemic and/or facultative required by some meanings expressed by modality. Notwithstanding, the qualitative analysis of these has focused on the (eventually asystematic) bringing together of notions such as intentionality, inchoateness, capability, etc. Henee, the methodology combines quantitative analyses with more quality-oriented diachronic and synchronic analyses. As a result, a corpus was elaborated, which was formed by 2443 samples extracted from CORDE, CREA, in RAE. This made it possible to validate and confirm [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some examples of iterative aspect, especially in French literature, show a highly complex structure : the iteration does not concern a single eventuality, but a combination of eventualities. In order to deal with these facts, we introduce a new category in the grammar of aspect : the cluster of eventualities. Through the analysis of attested examples, we describe the semantic properties of this new entity, which appears useful also for the analysis of some singulative sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the close relationship between the Russian-language prefixes "vy" and "iz." Using radial category profiling, the authors are able to examine the relatively abstract meaning of Church Slavic linguistic elements such as "iz," as opposed to the more concrete meanings of East Slavic elements like "vy." The discussion is further connected to the Russian-language aspectual system with its important differences between perfective and imperfective verbs. The authors are able to conclude that when forming prefixed aspectual partner verbs, the meanings of base verbs and prefixes become connected.

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article deals with the grammaticalization of the lexical meaning of QUO "to cross, pass" in Mandarin Chinese. QUO displays two aspectual/temporal values, known as the experiential suffix -guo and the phase complement guo respectively. The first indicates that in the past there is at least one instance of the event represented by the sentence and the second that an expected event has occurred and is now over. The experiential suffix refers to indefinite occurrences, whereas the phase complement refers to definite occurrences. These two values can be unified at a theoretical level. Aspectual QUO is concerned in all cases with the location of events in time: it situates an event in the (relative) past and it indicates either that among past events there is at least one occurrence of this type of event (suffix -guo), or that a particular (previously identified) event has passed, that is, entered the class of the past events (phase complement guo). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two connectionist networks, DISLEX and DevLex-II, were used in this study to model the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Both models use multi-layered self-organizing feature maps, connected by associative links trained according to the Hebbian learning rule. Previous empirical research has identified a strong association between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in child language, on the basis of which some researchers argue for innate semantic categories or prelinguistic predispositions. Our simulations indicate that such an association can emerge from dynamic self-organization and Hebbian learning in connectionist networks, without the need of a priori assumptions about the structure of innate knowledge. Our modeling results further attest to the utility of self-organizing neural networks in the study of language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's early production typically favors prototypical groupings of temporal-aspectual features; children prefer to say telic, perfective, past combinations (e.g., broke) and atelic, imperfective present combinations (e.g., riding). The current experiments examine the extent to which adults also favor these prototypical groups in a comprehension task (Experiment 1) and a sentence comparison task (Experiment 2). The results show that, like children, adults find prototypical combinations easier to understand, particularly in low-information contexts. Moreover, adults judge prototypical combinations as better sentences than nonprototypical sentences. The results are argued to support continuity in aspectual representations. The differences between children and adults is linked to the proposed origin of the prototypes themselves, namely, information processing demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is proposed that some grammatical phenomena related to aspectuality cannot be fully analyzed when the analysis is restricted to the sentence grammar. Though a complementary pragmatic approach can solve some of these problems, it seems to be necessary to take into account, from the beginning, the cognitive, situational, and textual contexts to determine the aspectual structure of the state of affairs evoked by the sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a study which investigates the consistent category of auxiliaries for the functional elements of Tense, Aspect, Modality (TAM) marking or agreement in Greek Sign Language (GSL). The research deals only with unbound grammatical markers, and discusses on the bound TAM morphemes. These are compared and described with their possible counterparts in other signed and spoken languages, also their characteristics are examined from a cross-linguistic perspective. An overview of the study's findings are offered.

Aspect is a general linguistic term utilised in the grammatical description of verbs; specifically, it is concerned with 'the way the grammar marks the duration of type of temporal activity denoted by the verb' (Crystal, 1991: 27). Originally used by specialists concerned with Slavic languages, in which aspect plays a key role, the concept of aspect has been shown to have significant implications for many other languages. In this article, the use of aspect and of aspectual markers in American Sign Language (ASL) will be explored. The argument to be presented is that ASL employs a variety of morphologically complex forms to express indications of aspect. For example, repetition and reduplication, changes in the direction of movement, changes in the nature of movement, changes in the speed of movement, changes in the use of space and spatial relations, as well as phonological changes, especially with respect to the use of a hold, all function to indicate aspectual distinctions in ASL. The morphological system for demonstrating aspectual relations will be explored, and implications for understanding aspect in the context of sign language linguistics will be discussed. Finally, comparisons will be made to similar phenomena in both British Sign Language and South African Sign Language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles focuses on the frequent use of stative verbs in progressive forms. Even though the students who learn English as second language (ESL) find it difficult to adjust the usage with what is found in grammar books, the use of stative verbs in progressive forms is acceptable. There are discourse contexts which necessitate the use of stative verbs like resemble, feel, and many others, in progressive forms. The problem for the ESL teachers and learners arises from the perception about the usage of English progressive. The author offers a principled explanation of the usage of progressive form of verbs in discourse. The generalization about the progressive is that progressive form focuses on a change or changes of state. So, when the speaker wishes to focus on a change of state, he uses progressive forms of verbs whether or not the verb is grammatically stative. It is the demands of discourse which justifies the use of stative verbs in progressive forms.

The article presents information on the definition of the sentence and the verb. Various definitions offer the sentence as an expression of complete thought. A complete sentence should have one subject with its predicate verb and it should be grammatically correct. The article states that every sentence should have three parts including subject, predicate and copula. The article offers definitions of the subject of the sentence, the predicate and the copula and all definitions show expression of thought. The logical aspect of the term predicate has been offered in the article. According to professor William Fowler, every grammatical sentence must imply a corresponding logical preposition. The verb and the preposition are words of relation and related to each other. The article suggests that the comprehensive course in grammar should be pure and simple.

A report is offered from the 21st Convention of Young Slavists in Göttingen, Germany, September 13 to 15, 2012. The author discusses the theories on Slavic linguistics including the use of the Belarusian verb "mec'," instances of adoption of English and jargon into Croatian, and the aspect of Russian verbs.