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This paper reports on a literary corpus study of four grammatical tenses across four European languages. The corpus consists of a selection of eight chapters from Javier Marías's Spanish novel Así empieza lo malo 'Thus bad begins', and its translations to English, Dutch, and French. We annotated 1579 verb forms in the Spanish source text for tense, and, subsequently, their translations in the other languages, distinguishing between two registers within the novel, i.e., dialogue and narration. We found that the vast majority of the Spanish tenses are translated one-to-one to their counterparts in the three languages, especially in narration. In dialogue, we found several deviations, which we could partially account for within an Optimality Theoretic approach by appealing to the notion of markedness along two different typological dimensions, namely, tense (present versus past) and aspect (imperfective versus perfective). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison of emerging signed languages and creole languages provides evidence that, when language is emerging, it prioritizes marking the novelty of information; is readily recursive; favors the manner of action (aspect) over the time of action (tense); develops inflection readily only in a visual, as opposed to aural, mode; and develops derivational opacity only as the result of drift over long periods of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses writing tips that feature verb tenses, aspects, and conditional sentences. Topics explored include the use of various tenses to orient readers about the time when the action happened, the differences between simple, continuous, and perfect aspects of a verb, and the use of conditional statements to describe possibilities or imaginary actions.

This paper presents a cross-linguistic typology of performatives, especially with respect to their relationship with tense and aspect, in the languages of the world. I explore the relationship between performatives and particular tenses and aspects, and touch on the mechanisms underlying such a relationship. The paper finds that there is not one relation between performatives and a particular tense and aspect and there are no languages which have a special (dedicated) performative tense or aspect marker. Instead, performatives are compatible with various tense and aspect markers, even though the use of a present tense seems to be the most common. What counts as the most optimal tense and aspect for performatives depends on the division of labor within the linguistic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with some features of the tempo-aspectual system of Shumcho, a small West Himalayish (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken in a few villages in the district Kinnaur (State of Himachal Pradesh) in the Indian Himalayas, and provides a descriptive account of the language's strategies to express progressive or habitual action and the effects of the respective markers with various types of predicates. I also consider the semantic (evidential) properties of the copulas and their interaction with the aspect/tense system, and offer some thoughts on the historical development of imperfective and perfective constructions as met in the present-day language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our knowledge about tense, aspect and modality (TMA) in the Oceanic languages of Melanesia has so far been severely limited by the lack of available data. Habituality in particular, as one of the less described TMA categories, has not yet been widely discussed for this group of languages. Based on corpus data and elicitations, we give a detailed overview of four languages, identifying common trends and addressing specific questions of general concern. These include the relation of habituality to (im)perfectivity and the relation between habituality and irrealis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this introduction article is to give a general overview of how habituality has been investigated in the literature as a grammatical category. In doing so, we first elaborate on the question of how habituality can be characterized and what difficulties one encounters in determining its properties, which include non-contingent modal event recurrence. A brief discussion of these issues is given in Section 2. Section 3 outlines selected (conceptual and formal) connections between habituality and other grammatical categories. What our observations essentially indicate is that habituality, on the one hand, closely interacts with several TAM categories, most prominently imperfective aspect and its derivatives (progressive, continuative), and also interacts in special ways with modal categories, such as the evidential or the future, on the other hand, we also observe – as has been done previously – that habituality is often not encoded overtly and can be expressed by several forms within one and the same language, and if overtly marked by a dedicated form, diachronically, it is not always stable. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the most relevant findings of the articles collected in the present special issue and highlights their importance for the general discussion about habituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The impact of second language (L2) on first language (L1), known as L2 transfer, has been suggested as a fundamental driving force of L1 attrition. The goal of this study was to test the differential attrition of verb aspect and tense in L1 (Russian) under the influence of L2 (German) grammatical properties. We also investigated whether the age of bilingualism onset and the amount of exposure to L1 modulate this L2 transfer effect. Methodology: We tested sentence processing in 30 adult Russian monolingual participants and 30 L1 attritors - Russian-German bilingual speakers - with early versus late bilingualism onset and with low versus high amounts of exposure to L1. Participants heard grammatically correct sentences, sentences with aspect violations and sentences with tense violations, and were asked to detect errors. Data and Analysis: The accuracy of participants' responses was analysed using generalized linear mixed-effects modelling in R. Findings: The L2 transfer effect was found, but was strongly modulated by the amount of L1 exposure: only bilinguals with little exposure to L1 showed greater attrition of L1 aspect compared to L1 tense. Moreover, the age of bilingualism onset proved to be more critical than the L2 transfer effect: an earlier bilingualism onset resulted in greater attrition of both aspect and tense in L1. Originality: The study provided new evidence about the differential impact of the grammatical similarity between L1 and L2, the age of bilingualism onset and the amount of L1 exposure on aspect and tense processing in L1 attritors. Implications: Our findings suggest that greater L1 use after immigration helps bilingual speakers to be less susceptible to L2 transfer and prevents attrition of L1-specific grammatical categories. Also, a general decline in processing verbal morphology is more likely to occur in speakers with an early rather than a late onset of bilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the distributional patterns of verb form frequencies in the Spanish past tense (the Preterit and the Imperfect) in the Corpus del Español (Davies, 2002). Following a usage-based approach, we examine the potential influence of input frequency as a driving factor in L2 learning. Results provide support for the existence of a distributional bias in L1 Spanish, with several telic predicates more often occurring in the Preterit and several atelic predicates in the Imperfect. Results also demonstrate that the distribution of verbs in the Preterit and the Imperfect is Zipfian, with the most frequent verbs overall accounting for the majority of all the tokens. Finally, an analysis of the different meanings of the Imperfect demonstrates clear differences in frequency of use with the continuous meaning as the most frequently expressed meaning, followed by habituality and progressivity. Implications for research and teaching are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of tense and aspect (TA) in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). It determines how learners create temporal reference using TA systems in complex languages. It provides evidence that researchers continue to assess the use and acquisition of TA both from a concept- and form-oriented perspective and developmental stages of encoding temporality.

A compositional analysis is provided of temporal perspective and orientation (Condoravdi 2002) of modals in Dutch, English, Gitksan (Tsimshianic), and St'át'imcets (Lillooet Salish). Modals interact freely with the tense-aspect architecture in each language. Temporal perspective is determined by an operator scoping over the modal, usually tense, while temporal orientation is determined by aspectual operators below it (and further restricted by the diversity condition). In contrast to much of the literature, it is argued that epistemic modals can scope under past tense. Modal-temporal interactions behave in predictable ways in Dutch, Gitksan, and St'át'imcets, whereas the English system is more idiosyncratic and partly lexicalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The recent prominence of verbal aspect theory has played an important role in helping NT exegetes more accurately interpret the use and meaning of verbs. In seeking to correct the abuses of the past, however, modern interpreters who embrace verbal aspect theory are also often guilty of placing too much interpretive weight on the tense-form of verbs, often describing them as being "marked." Focusing on imperatives, this essay demonstrates that verbs that are often highlighted as being emphasized by some scholars are simply the normal, expected form of that verb. In other words, sometimes an author does not make a subjective choice to portray an action in a certain way but submits to convention and uses the normal or expected form which is often influenced by a particular verb's inherent lexical meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language: Meaning & Form / Valoda: Nozime un Forma is the property of University of Latvia 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 paper analyzes TAM marking in the nominal domain in Chorote (Mataguayo or Matacoan; Argentina and Paraguay). In this language, some of the verbal TAM markers also occur in the nominal domain, and at least three of them can have scope over only the nominal but not over the predicate of the clause: the distant past pe(j), the irrealis -a and the conjectural (epistemic or evidential) -t'ey. The phenomenon is analogous to nominal TAM as described for many languages by but the difference is that Chorote markers are clitics or independent words and not nominal inflectional morphemes. Regarding the distant past marker, we argue that it codifies tense and not aspect or any other category; however, it is syntactically a modifier of the verb or the noun and not a functional category Tense like the one found in the verbal domain of European languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an experimental study addressing the second language acquisition of Mandarin temporality. Mandarin Chinese does not mark past, present, or future with dedicated morphemes; the native English of the learners does. It was hypothesized that, in their comprehension, learners would utilize the deictic pattern of expressing temporality, which postulates that bounded events tend to be interpreted as past and unbounded events as present. Twenty-eight bilingual native speakers, 25 intermediate learners, and 23 advanced learners of Mandarin with English as their native language took 3 different interpretation tests. Learners' temporal interpretation choices were highly accurate even at intermediate levels of proficiency, suggesting that obeying the deictic pattern in second language comprehension is not hard. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed. [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.)

The English tense and aspect systems have always been a problematic issue in translation, especially when a language as discrepant as Arabic is involved. Novice translators, as it is the case with university students, face difficulties in finding equivalent translations for tense and aspect either in Arabic or in English. More specifically, Moroccan learners not only find difficulty in translating the English present perfect- in both its simple and progressive reflexesinto Arabic, but they also fail to choose the correct equivalent English tense for the Arabic perfect and imperfect aspects. Building on some studies conducted mainly by Arab researchers (such as Bouras, 1999; Al-Fallay, 1999; Sekhri, 2009; Reishaan and Ja'far 2008; Kechoud, 2010; Mansour, 2011; and Abu Joudeh et al, 2013) who dealt with almost the same issue, this study describes some of the errors made by Moroccan undergraduate students in the area of tense-aspect translation. To achieve this, 63 Moroccan undergraduate university students were tested. The test was analysed carefully and the results we have achieved so far justified our claims. This study also tries to provide an explanation for the problem, as well as suggest some solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Klein () points out that within the treatment of the temporal semantics of English that he proposes, there is no need to maintain the traditional distinction between perfect aspect and anterior tense. An analysis of the semantics of perfect aspect in terms of placing the topic time in the post-time of the event under description can account for the anterior tense readings of the pluperfect as well. In this article, I argue that 'Klein's Conjecture' appears more problematic once extended to other languages, drawing on evidence from Japanese, Kituba, Kalaallisut, Korean, and Yucatec Maya. Languages such as Japanese have expressions of anterior tense that do not fit Klein's analysis of perfect aspect (topic time after event time), while others-e.g., Yucatec Maya-have expressions that fit Klein's analysis, but do not have anterior tense readings. The additions to Klein's theory necessary so it can accommodate the new evidence comprise a revised viewpoint aspect component that distinguishes not only relations between topic and event time, but also relations between topic time and the runtimes of states preceding and following the event in a causal chain, as well as an updated tense module that distinguishes relations between topic time and perspective times in addition to relations between topic time and utterance time. [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]

This article argues that the present tense-form (ἐρΧόμενον) used in the confession of 2 John 7 should be understood as parallel to the perfect tense-form (ἐληλυθότα) used in the confession of t John 4:2. After critically reviewing the five current ways the present tense-form is interpreted, the article outlines how recent research into verbal aspect indicates that the present and perfect tense-forms are closely related. Evidence of this relationship is then provided from 1 John allowing some conclusions to be drawn about the five current interpretive options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most compelling proofs Porter offers to substantiate his claim that Koiné Greek does not encode temporal reference in the verb is the test of contrastive sub-stitution. The reasoning goes that if the different tense-forms can be used in the same temporal context, then these forms must convey something other than time, i.e., Greek lacks tense. Porter's primary literature makes clear that his claim is invalid, yet neither he or nor subsequent researchers engage or acknowledge these counterarguments. This raises troubling questions about the adequacy of interdisciplinary peer-review in NT linguistic studies. [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 Bodos are living in different parts of Assam for centuries. They speak a language called Bodo that belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family of languages and it is one of the Associate state languages in Assam. It is a recognized language in the 8[sup th] Schedule of Indian constitution. Tense and Aspects are the grammatical categories, used in the grammatical description of verbs. Tense refers to the absolute location of event or action in time, e.g., past, present or future. And aspect refers to how an action or event is to be viewed with respect to time; it expresses actual location in time. The present paper is an attempt to look into the inflectional processes of the tense and aspect of Bodo. The paper will discuss the use of various types of Tense and Aspect markers found in Bodo. Bodo uses mainly three type of tenses, viz., Past, Present and Future. Past and future have separate tense markers, but present tense has no separate tense marker in this language. The past tense marker is {-mɯn} and the future is {-gɯn}. The present tense is used in the verbs as unmarked. There are four types of aspects found in this language, namely, Habitual, Progressive, Perfective and Perfect. The inflectional processes are 'verb + aspect', 'verb + aspect + tense', 'verb + tense' and 'noun + tense', etc. It is hoped that this analysis of tense and aspect in Bodo will help us in understanding tense and aspect in Bodo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *Last week, James has gone swimming every day) in their on-line comprehension. The L2 learners were equally able to distinguish correctly the past simple from the present perfect as measured by a traditional cloze test production task. They were also both able to assess the mismatch items as less acceptable than the match items in an off-line judgment task. Using a self-paced reading task, we investigated whether they could access this knowledge during real-time processing. Despite performing similarly in the explicit tasks, the two learner groups processed the experimental items differently from each other in real time. On-line, only the French L2 learners were sensitive to the mismatch conditions in both the past simple and the present perfect contexts, whereas the German L2 learners did not show a processing cost at all for either mismatch type. We suggest that the performance differences between the L2 groups can be explained by influences from the learners’ first language (L1): namely, only those whose L1 has grammaticized aspect (French) were sensitive to the tense/aspect violations on-line, and thus could be argued to have implicit knowledge of English tense/aspect distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are numerous studies that analyze the second language (L2) acquisition of aspect (e.g., see overviews and summaries in Ayoun and Salaberry 2005; Bardovi-Harlig 2000; Labeau 2005; Salaberry, 2008; Salaberry and Shirai 2002). The present study focuses on a specific component of tense-aspect: the iteration of eventualities (iterativity and habituality) conveyed with the use of Spanish Preterite and Imperfect respectively. The analysis is based on data from monolingual Spanish speakers and L1 English speakers with near-native competence in the L2 with the use of contextualized grammaticality judgments. The findings of the study show that near-native speakers of L2 Spanish do not distinguish fine-grained representations of aspectual knowledge (iterativity versus habituality), even though they demonstrate native-like judgments with more prototypical uses of aspect. The discussion of the findings points to possible effects of mapping of meaning and form in the L2, as well as possible instructional effects paired with frequency effects prompted by classroom environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the potential of combining learner corpus research with experimental studies in order to fine-tune the understanding of learner language development. It illustrates the complementarity of the two methodological approaches with data from an ongoing study of the acquisition of the English tense and aspect system by French learners. The first research question relates to the development of accuracy of tense and aspect usage in written production over time; longitudinal learner corpus data is used to answer this question. Its results are then incorporated into an experimental study that addresses the second research question, which seeks to uncover reasons why some tense and aspect features remain difficult to master even for advanced L2 learners. The first part of the article reviews the status of longitudinal research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and describes the Longitudinal Database of Learner English (Longdale) used for the study. The second half of the article presents the results of the learner corpus analysis. These reveal that over a period of 3 years, learners' tense and aspect errors decrease. However, the English progressive continues to present considerable learning difficulties. Two follow-up experiments investigated which elaborations of the progressive epistemic schema L2 learners continue to find difficult. They showed that advanced learners master the most salient elaboration of the present progressive (i.e., ongoingness, including extended ongoingness). By contrast, their understanding of less core uses (i.e., planned events) is much less precise. The article concludes with suggestions for the teaching of tense and aspect to advanced EFL learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some novel and hard-to-access data from Kalkoti, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in northern Pakistan. The particular focus is on showing how this Shina variety in a relatively short time span has drifted apart from its closest known genealogical relatives and undergone significant linguistic convergence with a Kohistani variety in whose vicinity Kalkoti is presently spoken. Among other features, we explore what seems like an ongoing process of tonogenesis as well as structural "copying" in the realm of tense and aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most treatments of temporal semantics start out from the conception of time as a line stretching from the past into the future, which is then populated with eventualities or situations. This paper explores how time can be seen as emerging from the construction of representations of reality in which the basic building blocks are static--i.e., timeless--representations, which are connected to each other by events that are transitions between them and that create an ordering which can be understood as temporal. This connects to von Wright's "logic of change" and the "hybrid semantics" suggested by Herweg and Löbner. In this context, telicity is seen as the capacity of events, or of the predicates that express them, to "create time" in the sense of defining a before and an after. The basic elements of the model are global states, which are timeless taken in isolation but are connected by transition events, which transform one global state into another and thereby define the temporal relationships between them. Transition events, corresponding to Vendlerian achievements, represent simple changes which are then the basis for all other constructs in the model, most notably delimited states, Vendlerian activities (atelic dynamic eventualities), and accomplishments (telic non-punctual eventualities), but also time points and intervals. Transition events are further instrumental in constructing narrative structures and are responsible for narrative progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review treats both Campbell’s book Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek specifically as well as his view of verbal aspect in Greek more generally. In the assessment of the latter, two points receive particular attention: (a) his desire to replace tense with spatial proximity/remoteness as the underlying semantic category encoded by the indicative, and (b) his identification of the perfect with imperfective aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to discuss and rationalize two arguments. Argument 1: The relationships between verbal word components (and thus between each verbal word form) constitute a hierarchy. Argument 2: Verbal word components (and thus each verbal word form) interact with each other. On the basis of the theoretical conclusions reached the article also proposes an analysis of the categories aspect, tense, and mood of the Russian verb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study suggests that Intermediate High and Advanced speakers produce aspectually valid constructions in Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) in large part because they are doing more than assigning aspect to lexical categories (Lexical aspect hypothesis), but because they are assigning lexicalized meaning to discrete verbs, for example govorit' (imperfective)-'to talk,' but skazat' (perfective)-'to say.' Analysis of the data from 55 OPIs conducted with second language (L2) Russian speakers ranging from Intermediate High to Superior confirms three hypotheses: (a) the proportion of aspectual utterances that owe their correctness to lexicalization decreases as proficiency increases; (b) aspectual competence as demonstrated by the greater number of aspectually non-lexicalized verbs in the speech of L2 Russian speakers rises with proficiency level; (c) a decrease in the proportion of lexicalized verbs in an examinee's speech correlates positively with an increase in the variety of verbs used. Other findings include a relative paucity of unprefixed verbs of motion in the corpus and a high ratio of lexicalized forms of skazat''to say,' and their distribution did not correlate with proficiency levels in either direction. The high ratio of aspectually lexicalized items in the corpus and the aspectual inaccuracies to which they lead have implications for teaching students who are approaching Intermediate High and Advanced levels of proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the status of the Aspect and Aktionsart categories, as well as the relationship between them. The analysis was based on a comparison between the Romance and North Slavonic languages, with particular emphasis on Polish and Spanish. From the typological point of view the first one can be classified as an aspect + cases type and the second one belongs to the article + tense languages. Therefore it analyses some differences between Spanish tenses pretérito and copretérito, as well as perfective and imperfective Aspect in Polish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses and critiques the philosophical concept of durée (duration), as developed by French philosopher Henri Bergson, from the perspective of Slavic linguistics. Departing from a comparative grammatical analysis of tenses and aspects of verbs in Slavic languages, the author suggests that Bergson's duration concept ought to be replaced with the notion of process as a better way to allow philosophical linguistics to describe time perception and time perspective. Related ideas suggested by philosopher Paul Bolberitz are also discussed.

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.)

Several languages have verbal tense, aspect and mood (TAM) and nonfiniteness markers that originate from spatial cases and adpositions. However, the evidence for the gradual loss of the original transparent and systematic correspondences is scarce. Due to the lack of analysis of rich and transparent verbal case systems in modern languages, the essence of the relationships between TAM and locative meanings is still a matter of debate, as in case of the progressive and the absentive. The Finnic dialect continuum provides unique data for clarifying the unresolved issues. Finnic parades an elaborate system of nonfinites with the properties of nominals and verbs. The nonfinites combine with a rich case system whose spatial meaning is bleached to different extent in the combinations. I coin a new term for the case phenomenon -- cross-categorial case -- and I analyze the Finnic rich cross-categorial case paradigms to provide evidence about the functioning of a transparent system of spatial forms and TAM meanings. A corpus study of the Estonian inessive nonfinites (the mas-construction) exemplifies how the correspondences in space and time as well as social cognition interact in the progressive and the absentive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation of Japanese temporal clauses depends on an intricate interplay between a number of factors including, in addition to the temporal connective, the tense and aspectual properties of the embedded clause as well as the matrix clause. This paper presents a detailed survey of these interactions and a model-theoretic compositional analysis which improves significantly over previous proposals in terms of attention to empirical detail and internal simplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The aim of this article is to account for tense/aspect and mood based differential subject and object marking. We propose an analysis in terms of an optimization procedure between two general potentially conflicting constraints, the faithfulness constraint Identify, which requires the A and the P argument to be identified, either by case or by the context, and the markedness constraint Economy, which penalizes case marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aspect hypothesis ( Andersen & Shirai, 1994 ) proposes that language learners are initially influenced by the inherent semantic aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect (TA) morphology. Perfective past emerges earlier with accomplishments and achievements and progressive with activities. Although this hypothesis has been extensively studied, there have been no analyses of the frequency, form, and function of relevant types and tokens in the input. This article reports the results of 2 corpus-based studies investigating how various features of the input—frequency distributions, reliabilities of form–function mapping, and prototypicality of lexical aspect—affect TA morphology. Study I determined the relative frequency profiles of exemplars of English TA and employed various statistics to determine the associations between particular verb–aspect combinations. Study II expanded the aspect hypothesis, examining whether native speakers judge the most frequent forms in isolation to be more prototypical in lexical aspect. Analyses were then matched against acquisition data for different TA patterns by adult learners of English ( Bardovi-Harlig, 2000 ) to determine whether the verbs' acquisition order is determined by their frequency, form, and function in the input. Rather than testifying to the effect of 1 factor alone, the results suggest that frequency, distinctiveness, and prototypicality jointly drive acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a crosslinguistic study into the acquisition of form-to-meaning correspondences in the domain of aspect. How may form affect the acquisition process and how may meaning do so? The results from aspectual comprehension experiments with Dutch, Italian and Polish L1 learners reveal that both form and meaning properties affect the acquisition path and lead to developmentally different patterns across languages. The semantics of perfective aspect is acquired earlier than imperfective aspect. Moreover, there is a surprising discrepancy in the understanding of perfective aspect. Whereas Dutch and Polish children have acquired the completion entailment of their Present Perfect and perfective aspect respectively by the age of 3, Italian 3-year-olds perform at chance with their Present Perfect. These results do not support the hypothesis of Uniformity of Aspect Acquisition, which claims that certain aspectual notions (in particular, perfective aspect) are acquired around the same age independent of the language-specific encoding. Instead I put forward an acquisition theory of form-to-meaning correspondences that is sensitive both to form – Morphological Salience, namely, the idea that the semantics of morphologically salient paradigms is acquired early – and to meaning – Semantic Complexity, namely, the idea that the semantics of simple aspectual operations is acquired early. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article examines the acquisition of Korean imperfective markers, the progressive - ko iss- and the resultative - a iss-, with a view to understanding how tense/aspect morphology expands beyond prototype associations with inherent aspects of the verbs. We hypothesized that - a iss- will develop later than - ko iss-, but that the development of -a iss- will precede or coincide with the expansion of - ko iss- marking for result state meaning. Cross-sectional data were collected from 120 learners of second language Korean using a sentence interpretation task and a guided picture description task. The results support our hypothesized acquisition route of imperfective markers, establishing dynamic durativity as the prototypical meaning of the Korean imperfective - ko iss- and suggesting individual variation in expanding the prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences in the interpretation of would-conditionals with simple (perfective) and perfect antecedent clauses are marked enough to discourage a unified view. However, this paper presents a unified, Lewis-Stalnaker style semantics for the modal in such constructions. Differences in the interpretation of the conditionals are derived from the interaction between the interpretation of different types of aspect and the modal. The paper makes a distinction between perfective and perfect aspect in terms of whether they make reference to or quantify over Lewis-style events. In making reference to Lewis-events, perfective aspect is shown to be incompatible with counterfactual would-conditionals. The so-called 'epistemic flavor' of perfective conditionals about the future is derived from the use of diagonalization as an interpretive strategy called upon to resolve reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the Korean suffix -te, which has been variously analyzed as a marker of tense, aspect, tense-aspect, mood, mood-tense, or evidentiality. I argue against all of these approaches and propose instead that -te is a spatial deictic past tense, which triggers an evidential environment. It refers to a certain past time when the speaker either observed an event or some evidence of the event within his (her) perceptual field. Thus, the denotation of-te is 'overlap', not between the speaker's perceptual field and the event itself, but between the speaker's perceptual field and the evidence of the event at the past reference time. To account for this denotation, I propose an 'evidence trace' function as well as a 'speaker's perceptual trace' function (cf. M. Failer, J Semantics 21:45-85, 2004). My analysis shows that suffixes like -ess (which is traditionally analyzed as a perfect) play two roles, as an indirect evidential and a perfect, depending on whether they appear with the spatial deictic tense -te or with a simple deictic tense. I argue that in Korean two distinct tense systems--the regular tense-aspect system and the spatial deictic tense-evidential system--exist in parallel. Thus the proposed analysis allows evidentials to be subsumed under the formal theory of tense, aspect, and mood. [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.

The study of SLA began around the beginning of the 70s with the emergence of both theoretical and empirical studies. Undoubtedly, the acquisition of tense/aspect, besides other topics, has attracted much interest from. researchers. This study investigated the use of telic and atelic verb forms in the oral production of Turkish speakers of English (non-native speakers or NNSs) and native speakers of English (NSs). To elicit how the foreground and background of narrative formed; which tense/aspect is preferred in the foreground and background, each participant produced one monologue whose topic was retelling a film. The results showed that the discourse of non-native speakers exhibit target-like qualities not only in terms of usage of verbs according to their inherent semantic aspect of verbs only but also in terms of distribution of verb types in the foreground and background of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Aspect Hypothesis (AH) (Andersen 1986, 1991) suggests an eight-stage development of the Spanish tense–aspect system by English learners in which tenses progressively mark verb categories. The current paper, which presents some of the main findings from Labeau (2005), explores the relevance of the AH to an acquisitional setting other than that for which it was developed. Specifically, it tests the four tenets of the AH, as described by Shirai and Kurono (1998) against data from the acquisition of the French tense/aspect system by advanced learners of French in a tutored environment. It compares the use of French verbal morphology by advanced Anglophone learners with a control group of native speakers engaging in a variety of tasks: (1) oral and written narratives (2) a grammar cloze-test and (3) a written editing task. Having shown that the basic hypothesis is unable to account for the development of advanced French, the study tests an expanded version of the AH (Andersen 2002) and suggests further factors to take into account in the description of advanced stages of tense–aspect acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous temporal relations of verbal actions have been analysed in terms of various grammatical means of expressing verbal temporalisation such as tense, aspect, duration and iteration. Here the temporal relations within verb semantics, particularly ordered pairs of verb entailment, are studied using Allen's interval-based temporal formalism. Their application to the compositional visual definitions in our intelligent storytelling system, CONFUCIUS, is presented, including the representation of procedural events, achievement events and lexical causatives. In applying these methods we consider both language modalities and visual modalities since CONFUCIUS is a multimodal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is situated within a growing strand of research on second language acquisition and emotion (Dewaele and Pavlenko 2002). It investigates the perception of emotional intensity associated with verb semantics, tense and aspect forms in the English of 20 native speakers and 33 second language users through a written questionnaire containing 36 utterances. Utterances included simple and complex verb forms with different aspectuo-temporal markers. Statistical analyses revealed significant differences in perceived emotional intensity between native speakers and L2 users. It is argued that while learners may comprehend the aspectuo-temporal values of tense-aspect markers, they have yet to learn the elusive "non-temporal" values of these markers (i.e. semantic-pragmatic functions) in specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]