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The present paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the verbal aspect in general and with special emphasis on the comparison of Chinese and Slovenian lexical aspect. Recognised discrepancies between the conceptualisation and verbalisation of actions in unrelated languages indicate that deeper cognitive differences affect our perception of reality, which is something that should be more widely recognized when learning and teaching foreign languages. The contribution of this article is a comparative analysis of available studies by authoritative linguists, based on which we have formulated a new and more comprehensive proposal that will help classify verb types in unrelated languages, and can be further exploited in the field of applied linguistic research.

This paper looks into some English lexical correspondents of aspectual pairs in Serbo-Croatian (SC). Because SC and English are diametrically opposed in terms of how overtly they express aspect, SC and English are usually seen as typical representatives of languages with and without aspect, respectively. In SC, the aspectual dichotomy is expressed by the following three instruments in the following order of frequency: a) pairs of lexically related verbs; b) biaspectual verbs, and c) pairs of different verbs. Our analysis shows that ‘aspectless’ English uses the same three instruments but in a different order of frequency. Most English verbs are biaspectual, i.e. their aspectual interpretation depends on a number of factors outside the verb. This study focuses on the other two instruments. Several different types of such lexical means for the expression of aspectual dichotomy in English are identified according to the lexical and morphological relations between their members.

Although SLA research has extensively investigated the role of lexical aspect in L2 acquisition of tense-aspect marking, the role of L1 is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates the effect of cross-linguistic variation in lexical aspect and explores how the learning of lexical aspect interacts with the acquisition of aspectual morphology, using oral picture-description and written judgment tasks. 391 learners of Japanese (L1 English, Chinese, and Korean) participated in the study. The results show that L2 learners have problems in rejecting incorrect L2 aspectual structures (but not in accepting correct ones) when such structures involve L1–L2 discrepancy in lexical aspect. The results also confirmed a strong L1 effect at the level of surface inflected verbal form, showing significantly higher accuracy for items for which direct translation yields correct meaning than those that do not. It is argued that L1 transfer may be playing an important role in the L2 acquisition of aspect in that both positive and negative transfer collectively determine the order of acquisition predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis.

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.

Previous studies have shown that the grammatical aspect of verb predicates has an effect on tense-aspect sentence processing. However, it remains unclear as to whether the interaction of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect can influence the form-meaning association in the second language (L2) tense-aspect sentence processing, especially for the learners whose native language is grammatically marked differently from their L2. This study conducts a psycholinguistic investigation to highlight how the prototypical and non-prototypical associations predicted in the Aspect Hypothesis and L2 proficiency level influence the processing of English past tense and progressive morphology by Mandarin Chinese learners at two proficiency levels and native English speakers. The results show that the prototypical associations of English tense-aspect categories predicted in the Aspect Hypothesis, such as achievement verbs with past tense and activity verbs with the progressive aspect, can engender shorter reading time than non-prototypical associations for both native speakers and second language learners. There is no significant difference between native speakers and Chinese learners of English in their processing of prototypical items, while significant differences exist in the processing of non-prototypical items. The L2 proficiency level does not have an effect on the processing of prototypes but on the processing of non-prototypes in the L2 tense-aspect marking. This study extends previous research, showing the interaction effect of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in the form-meaning association in L2 tense-aspect sentence processing.

This pilot study investigated university-level intermediate Spanish learners’ (n=16) explicit knowledge about a contrast in grammatical aspect (preterite/imperfect) after they received rule-based explicit instruction. Prior studies have found that learners’ explicit knowledge about preterite and imperfect includes partially understood rules, which can have long-lasting effects on their performance, so it is important to investigate the disconnect between what is taught and what is learned. Learners completed a cloze test and then introspected about their performance. The data were analysed qualitatively and compared to verbalisations of L1 Spanish speakers (n=6). Four main themes emerged: learners failed to learn the concept of grammatical aspect, they demonstrated confusion about lexical aspect, they attributed the difference between preterite and imperfect to a binary system of lexical aspect feature complexes based on duration of the verb/predicate, and they relied on self-developed categorical rules about adverbial markers. Suggestions for modifications to the conventional pedagogical rules are offered.

Among the sources of non-culminating readings, we find the agentive properties of the external argument. According to the Agent Control Hypothesis (ACH), the agenthood of the subject licenses a non-culminating interpretation with causative accomplishment predicates, whereas non-agentive subjects generally oblige a culminating reading. Experiencer object verbs such as annoy or surprise are analyzed as having a causative reading, encoding a situation where the agent or causer brings about the state in the experiencer. Based on this similarity with causative accomplishments, this article investigates the impact of an agentive interpretation of the subject on the cancellation of the state in object experiencers in Spanish and Korean transitive psych predicates in a parallel experimental design. In accordance with the ACH, results revealed for both languages that subject animacy had a significant effect on the acceptability of a zero-state reading. Furthermore, the interaction of subject animacy with the lexical aspect of the verb yielded a significant effect in the Spanish data such that cancelling of the state in the experiencer was significantly more acceptable with psych verbs denoting inchoative state causatives than with those denoting punctual causative events. In a second acceptability study, the verbs were tested for their compatibility with an agentive interpretation of the subject. The obtained (gradient) agentivity values turned out to significantly predict the potential of each verb to have a zero-state reading for the subclasses denoting pure and inchoative state causatives, which further supports the ACH.

The verb jau5 ‘have’ in Cantonese can be placed immediately before the verbal or adjectival predicate, forming “jau5 + predicate” construction (henceforth pre-predicate jau5), and pervious analyses consider the pre-predicate jau5 as the preposed perfective marker –zo2. The same construction “you ‘have’ + VP” renders ungrammaticality in Mandarin, with the post-verbal perfective –le being its only form. In this paper, contra previous analyses, I argue that pre-predicate jau5 and post-verbal perfective –zo2 cannot be equivalents. Following S.F. Huang's (1981) ideas on determiner quantifiers, I propose that Cantonese pre-predicate jau5 ‘have’ is an assertive existential quantifier operating in the domain of verbs and their event time, which gives rise to two assertive meanings: (i) When the situation is interpreted as non-specific, pre-predicate jau5 asserts at least one occurrence of the event; and (ii) when the situation is interpreted as specific, jau5 asserts the actualization of the natural final endpoint or the explicit bound of the situation. The existential nature of jau5 ‘have’ is inherently borne out in the lexical semantics of “have”, and the proposed analysis reveals that when assertive existential quantification performs in situations, assertions are sensitive to (i) the lexical aspect of the verbal predicates and (ii) the specificity of the situation. It leads to the theoretical implications that: (i) endpoints/boundaries of situations should be linguistically differentiated between actualized and potential ones, following Dahl's (1981) proposal; and (ii) stage-level stative patterns are more like events than states in its endpoint properties.

In this paper, the interplay of modal markers with the lexical aspect of the verb in Han period Chinese is at issue. Abraham and Leiss (Modality-aspect interfaces: Implications and typological solutions, 2008) propose a strong and possibly universal relation between the verbal aspect and either the root/deontic or the epistemic reading of a modal verb based on data from the Germanic languages. In this article, this hypothesis will be checked against the data of Late Archaic and Early Middle (Han period) Chinese. It will be proposed that a relation similar to that in the Germanic languages can also be established for Chinese at least for the root modal values, despite the obvious differences between the aspectual and modal system of Chinese and that of the Germanic languages. As in the Germanic languages, root modal verbs in general select verbs/predicates which are compatible with the perfective aspect, i.e. [+TELIC] verbs. Due to the fact that epistemic readings have not developed yet for modal auxiliary verbs, the constraints proposed in Abraham and Leiss for the epistemic reading of modal verbs in combination with imperfective or [−TELIC] verbs cannot be confirmed for LAC and EMC. Epistemic modality is expressed by sentential adverbs which take an entire proposition as their complement. These are less confined in their selectional restrictions than modal auxiliary verbs.

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 :)

In this work, we examine the factors allowing or disallowing French Complex Event Nominals (CENs, i.e. deverbal nominals displaying argument and aspectual structures, Grimshaw 1990) to occur in the plural when denoting a plurality of events. Our claim is that French CENs can occur in the plural in such cases (Meinschaefer 2005; Roodenburg 2006; Sleeman & Brito 2010), and thus behave as count nouns. However, a restricted subclass does not exhibit number variation, similarly to other non-count nouns.To account for the distribution of nominal plurality, we rely on lexical aspect. We show that the CENs that do not admit pluralization are strictly atelic: they nominalize strictly stative verbs or push-verbs (Verkuyl 1993). Conversely, CENs derived from any other aspectual verb class can appear in the plural, even when they nominalize atelic VPs, provided these also have a telic use. This leads to a restatement of the role of boundedness previously invoked to account for the relationship between verbal (a)telicity and nominal [±count] distinction (Bach 1976; Mourelatos 1978; Krifka 1989), that linked the [±count] property of the derived event nominal to the actual (a)telicity of the VP.Since the distribution of plural just described is proper to CENs, which have an internal verbal structure, we suggest that it deserves a syntactic analysis. Our hypothesis is that [–count] CENs derive from verbs that are deprived of AspQP (Borer 1993; 2005). This results in turn in the absence of ClP and NumP in the nominal layers. The absence of ClP accounts for the fact that [–count] CENs do not behave as regular mass nouns.

The aim of the paper is to examine the Korean ditransitive verb juda and deulida in terms of lexical aspect. Even though it is considered to be one of the inherent properties of verbs, the lexical aspect of a verb can be changed according to features of arguments and thematic relations of arguments in the sentence. The verb juda can function as achievement aspect, active achievement aspect or accomplishment aspect depending on the [±concrete]-feature of a direct object and the semantic role of an indirect object. The verb deulida, which is the honorific form of the verb juda, connotes the lexical aspect of achievement, accomplishment and active achievement according to the feature of a direct object.

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.

In Late Archaic and Early Medieval Chinese aspectual distinctions are mainly expressed by aspectual adverbs. These adverbs are characterized by their close relation with the lexical aspect of the verb they modify. This paper argues for the existence of an Inner Aspect Phrase within an articulated VP (vP) in Late Archaic and Early Medieval Chinese which hosts the lexical aspect of the verb. This Inner Aspect Phrase corresponds to an Outer Aspect Phrase outside the VP, which hosts the grammatical aspect. The aspectual adverbs are analyzed as specifiers of the Outer Aspect Phrase. The correspondence of the two Aspect Phrases accounts for the close connection between aspectual adverbs and the telicity features of the verb in Late Archaic and Early Medieval Chinese. In ancient Chinese aspectual distinctions apparently have been marked by affixation. This morphological system concerns the lexical aspect, the Inner Aspect Phrase, rather than the grammatical aspect, the Outer Aspect Phrase. If this hypothesis proved to be correct, the grammatical aspect would not have been marked in the morphology of the verb at all, but purely by lexical means, i.e., by aspectual adverbs and possibly by sentence-final particles.

Resultative secondary predicates, or resultatives, express the state of a participant of an event as a result of the action denoted by a verb. On the other hand, resultatives bear a semantic relation to the main predicate as well. Due to this fact and due to their encoding by adverbs, Lithuanian resultatives are superficially similar to adverbials. This might be the reason why resultative secondary predicates have for a long time remained unnoticed in Lithuanian linguistics. A boundary between resultatives proper and the so-called pseudo-resultatives has to be drawn in order to get an accurate description of the phenomenon. Pseudo-resultatives are constructions semantically and/or formally resembling resultatives proper but lacking the causative relation between the primary and secondary predications; they can, at best, be treated as belonging to the periphery of the domain of resultatives. As the data of Lithuanian, Russian and Polish resultatives reveals, the three languages share some common features. First, all of them encode the basic result component by means of verbal prefixes, while the secondary predicates only specify the result that is already implied by a verb. Secondly, all languages make use of prepositional phrases including the preposition to as one of the strategies for encoding resultative secondary predication. Besides, Lithuanian and Polish, unlike Russian, generally avoid resultatives based on intransitive verbs (except optionally transitive verbs like eat and drink ). However, there are major differences as regards the distribution of to -PPs in the languages. In Lithuanian the use of to -PPs is determined by the lexical aspect of a verb: accomplishments usually do not combine with resultative prepositional phrases, while activities do. Another factor operates in Russian and Polish: to -PPs are used with verbs that emphasize a process leading up to the resulting property, while the verbs that highlight the resulting property as such take resultatives encoded by other strategies. In the former case the resulting property is accumulated as the action proceeds: to load the cart full , to eat oneself full , etc. In the latter case a verb usually implies a bundle of finer-grained properties for which the values have to be set in advance: to paint the car red/green/blue , to cook the egg hard/soft , etc. The difference between the accumulated property and the pre-set value can also be formulated in terms of goal and manner: the accumulated property parallels progressing towards the goal, while the pre-set value resembles the manner in which an action is carried out. Polish and Russian, in turn, also show a difference: the former distinguishes two types of resultatives (expressing a pre-set value and expressing an accumulated property), while the latter in addition has a special type of marking for resultatives like to wipe the table clean which are intermediate between the preset-value and the accumulated-property types. Keywords: resultatives; action; predicate; pseudo-resultatives; causative

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...

The aim of the paper is to examine the specific features of English and Korean semelfactive verbs in terms of lexical aspect which is considered to be one of the inherent properties in verbs. Related to verb classification, Van Valin divided verbs on the basis of the inherent semantic properties of them. His tests to define semelfactives are composed of the compatibility of a verb and adverbial modifiers as well as the possibility of a progressive form of a verb. Using his tests, we analyzed a group of relevant verbs in Korean based on the internal semantic features of lexical aspect. The result of the tests demonstrated that semelfactive verbs in Korean are closely similar to those in English. Consequently, it is semantically appropriate to classify Korean semelfactive verbs as a distinctive verb type like English.

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.

In the Surinamese creole language Sranan, verbs in finite clauses that lack overt TMA-marking are often considered to be ambiguous between past and present interpretations (depending on the lexical aspect of the verb involved) or analyzed as having a perfective value. We claim that these verbs are in fact zero-marked, and we investigate the various uses of this zero expression in relation to context and lexical aspect on the basis of corpus data and native speaker elicitations. It is shown that existing analyses do not cover and unify all the various uses of the construction. We propose, as an alternative, to regard the zero form as present perfective marker, whereby tense and aspect are conceived of as fundamentally epistemic categories, in line with Langacker (1991). This combination of present tense and perfective aspect, which is regarded as infelicitous in typological studies of tense and aspect (cf. the ‘present perfective paradox’, Malchukov 2009), gives rise to the various interpretations associated with zero. However, in all of its uses, zero still indicates that, at the most basic level, a situation belongs to the speaker’s conception of ‘immediate reality’ (her domain of ‘inclusion’). This basic ‘presentness’ distinguishes zero from the past-tense marker ben, which implies dissociation.

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.

This article proposes an analysis of the historical changes in the aspectual system of Greek as a process of grammaticalization and subjectification, thus challenging the traditional view of Greek verbal aspect as a stable and in fact extremely conservative category, possibly very close to that of Proto-Indo-European. Specifically, the claim put forward here is that the original tripartite morphological opposition (Aorist-Present-Perfect stems) expressed Aktionsart, i.e. lexical aspect, distinctions (punctuality/telicity-durativity/atelicity-state, respectively) while the modern binary morphological opposition (Aorist-Present stems) expresses the purely aspectual perfective-imperfective opposition. Since Aktionsart is based on inherent features of the action/state denoted by the verb while aspect expresses the speaker's point of view, this constitutes a shift from objectivity to subjectivity as well as a somewhat atypical grammaticalization process. © 2014 © 2014 The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.

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.

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 explores the encoding of telicity in Hungarian. While proposing a mereological, scalar semantic analysis, it shows that Hungarian uses a telicity-marking strategy in which it contrasts with English, where telicity is not the direct consequence of an overt marker but arises as a cumulative effect of specific, well-definable properties of various components of verbal predicates including the head verb and its argument(s). A major contribution of the analysis, which mainly addresses telicity marking in the class of non-creation/non-consumption predicates in neutral sentences, lies in the fact that it reveals important cross-linguistic differences with respect to the aspectual role of verbal particles and resultative/locative expressions and the referential properties of telic verbal predicates. As for the former, it is demonstrated that Hungarian verbal particles and resultative/locative expressions mark telicity by directly placing bounds on events by virtue of serving an event maximalizing function, whereas the English counterparts of these elements do not have such direct event-bounding effects. As for the latter, it emerges that in Hungarian quantized reference is a necessary and sufficient condition for telicity in cases where in English it is only sufficient.

This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach – combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data – in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) in L2 Spanish. Data elicited through one comprehension and three oral tasks with varying degrees of experimental control show that the emergence of temporal markings is determined mainly by the dynamic/non-dynamic contrast (whether a verb is a state or an event) as beginner and intermediate speakers use Preterit with event verbs but Imperfect mainly with state verbs. One crucial finding is that although advanced learners use typical Preterit–telic associations in the least controlled oral tasks, as predicted by the LAH, this pattern is often reversed in tasks designed to include non-prototypical (and infrequent) form–meaning contexts. The results of the comprehension task also show that the Preterit-event and Imperfect-state associations observed in the production data determine the interpretation that learners assign to the Preterit and the Imperfect as well. These results show that beginner and intermediate learners treat event verbs (achievements, accomplishments and activities) in Spanish as a single class that they associate with Preterit morphology. We argue that dynamicity contrasts, and not telicity, affect learners’ use of past tense forms during early stages of acquisition.

This paper investigates the use of got in interrogative sentences and their corresponding answers in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Lee, Ling, and Nomoto analyze CSE got as a realis marker from which several different meanings are derived, including temporal location, aspect, and emphasis. Whilefollowingintheiressentialclaims,weproposethattheacceptabilityofthegot-interrogativesandtheir answers depends on the inherent lexical aspect of the verb (aktionsart) that accompaniesgot in interrogative sentences.Concerninggot-interrogativesandtheiranswers,wediscusssituation-basedsentencesthatdenote the experiential, habitual, and completive aspects, as well as those sentences that have stative meanings. We suggest that stative sentences are critical to our aspectual analysis, as the notion of stativity, rather than realis vs. irrealis distinction, is the primary determinant of the acceptability judgments concerning the situational interpretations of the got-interrogatives and their answers.

It was observed in earlier studies on Singaporean English (e.g. Ho and Platt, 1993 ) that the past tense was used in marking present as well as past habitual aspect. Ho and Platt’s main thesis had proposed that the use of past tense in Singaporean (Colloquial) English was as a marker of lexical perfectivity rather than tense, and that, phonetic factors aside, the lexical aspect of the verb itself determined whether or not the past tense would be used at all to mark past time reference. The use of already as a marker of both perfect aspect and grammatical perfectivity, equivalent in function to Mandarin Chinese le , has also been observed by Bao (1995, 2005) , and it is questioned to what extent such forms are in competition with one another. Little attention, however, has been afforded to the study of past tense in non-past environments in Singaporean (Colloquial) English, including those that may be considered to be, in some accounts, grammatically imperfective in terms of aspect marking, and ambivalent in terms of realis or irrealis marking. The present study isolates the use of past tense in marking future anteriority in realis conditional clauses and their semantic equivalents (where it is used to mark not only lexical perfectivity but grammatical perfectivity as well), in marking present habitual aspect, in expressing future plans, and in performative uses. It is questioned why the past tense can share with already some of its functions of marking grammatical perfectivity (but with non-past time reference), and why such perfective environments that can support a strongly realis function in a contact dialect are correspondingly situations for generating meanings of potentiality and irrealis in standard usage. The study also compares such uses with the distribution of the positive-declarative, periphrastic do -auxiliary in the history of English, a form that was claimed to function as a perfective marker in Middle and Early Modern English ( Denison, 1993; Ziegeler, 2006 ). Many such uses were found in similar environments to those in which the non-temporal past tense is found in Singaporean Colloquial English.

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.

As part of a larger project into the acquisition of tense-aspect marking in Korean, this paper reports the findings of a piece of experimental research looking into “when” and “how” second language learners of Korean develop use of the progressive marker “ko issta”. The paper sets out to test the claims made by the aspect hypothesis (Shirai 1991, Andersen & Shirai 1996) regarding acquisition of progressive marking; namely that (1) progressive marking is acquired first on activity verbs and later on accomplishment and achievement verbs and that (2) learners do not commit "errors" of using progressive marking with state verbs. However, we acknowledge several problems in applying these claims to Korean: (1) since “-ko issta” can be more easily omitted with activity verbs than with other verb types, it appears questionable that progressive marking is acquired primarily with activity verbs in the case of Korean; (2) in contradiction to claims that learners do not “mis-use” progressive marking with state verbs, Korean “-ko issta” frequently occurs with a category of such verbs (cognitive/emotive) verbs in native speaker talk and (3) Korean verbs of wearing may operate both as accomplishment and as achievement verbs, resulting in dual readings when used with progressive marking. Data was collected through a cloze-style test sat by 40 learners of Korean (20 at elementary level and 20 at advanced level) and retrospective interviews. Analysis of the results can be summarized as follows: (1) contrary to the claims of the aspect hypothesis, progressive marking in L2 Korean occurs first on accomplishment rather than activity verbs, (2) Korean L2 learners acquire progressive marking on cognitive-emotive verbs at a late stage and struggle to fully grasp the meaning even at advanced levels, (3) with verbs of wearing, learners acquire the “accomplishment” reading first and the “achievement” meaning later. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of this research for Korean language education and by making concrete recommendations as to how teaching of this important point of tense-aspect can be improved.

Both children and adults tend to produce predicates with lexical aspect, grammatical aspect and tense in particular prototypical combinations. While it has been argued that these prototypes constitute the linguistic knowledge that children have of tense, others argue that they are independent dimensions of knowledge, even in child language, and that the prototypical groupings of these dimensions in child language fall together for non-linguistic cognitive reasons. Recent studies of child Spanish suggest non-adult-like use of verb finiteness. In light of these facts, we seek to determine whether Spanish-speaking children are also delayed in their comprehension of prototypical tense and aspect combinations. Twenty-three Spanish-speaking children (mean age = 3;10) from Mexico City were given a comprehension task and scored on their ability to select a picture corresponding to different tense-aspect combinations. Children were largely able to successfully interpret tense and aspect information as it was conveyed in the adult-like cues.

Debates on the relationship between the aspectual properties of verbs and past marking in Caribbean English Creoles tend to focus on two main issues. The first is the semantic function of the “relative past” and its relation to the unmarked verb, and the second is the discourse functions of the relative past marker and the unmarked verb. This paper addresses two issues related to this debate. Using fieldwork data from Belizean Creole, I present a qualitative analysis of tense usage in discourse focusing on the role of the inherent lexical aspect (aktionsart) of predicates. I examine how two different notions of past meaning are distributed between marked and unmarked verbs with different aktionsarten. I also look at the discourse function of these verbs in the contexts of the meanings expressed. I argue that an analysis of both the aktionsarten of the verbs and discourse factors are critical to developing an understanding of the range of meanings and functions of both the relative past marker and the unmarked verb. The paper also presents a new approach to the study of temporal reference in creoles. The picture-based story method provides an objective way of evaluating speakers’ choice of grounding and also facilitates comparison across speakers, given that several potentially variable aspects of the narrative are controlled for.

The paper presents the special characteristics of the Catalan past perfect tense. In the majority of languages, and, more specifically, in neo-latin languages, similar structures, containing verbs of movement tend to modify into future tense. As opposed to this, the structure“anar + infinitive” stands for past perfect in modern Catalan. The perfect aspect component raises the question of how this tense became grammaticized, a process examined by the author from the historic pragmatic point of view. There are two main hypotheses concerning the aspect of the medieval antecedent of the structure. According to the so-called inchoative hypothesis, the medieval “anar + infinitive” was an inchoative periphrasis. The other thesis attributes past perfect quality to the structure already in medieval Catalan. The perfect aspect can be traced back either to the verbal aspect of the auxiliar verb in past perfect, rather common in medieval Catalan structures, or, in earlier sources, to the lexical aspect of perfect-aspect verbs in the structure. The author employs two main lines of methodology: on the one hand, the phenomenon is analyzed in correlation with structures similar either in form or function; on the other hand, it considers the more ample context of medieval use. The author concludes that the modern Catalan past perfect is not rooted in an inchoative periphrasis, but evolved from a compound structure expressing intention, which probably gave rise to pragmatical conclusions in its contexts of use. As a result of these pragmatical conclusions, the meaning of the structure transformed from a structure with a perfect or completive aspect into the past perfect tense of modern Catalan.

Previous studies on the L2 acquisition of -teiru in Japanese have revealed that the resultative meaning of -teiru is learned later than its progressive meaning, as predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai and Kurono, Language Learning, 48, 245–279, 1998). It has also been found that learners have problems with the resultative meaning of -teiru when there is L1—L2 crosslinguistic discrepancy in lexical aspect (Nishi, Verb learning and the acquisition of aspect: Rethinking the universality of lexical aspect and the significance of L1 transfer. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, 2008). While researchers have uncovered the universal tendency of the developmental process of -teiru, it is not clear what promotes the learning of more difficult (or less prototypical or more marked) meanings of -teiru, and to what extent instruction affects the learning. It is also a question of whether the lexical aspect of verbs in L2 is learnable. As an attempt to address these issues, this study investigated the role of explicit grammar instruction on the learning of the resultative meaning of -teiru, by teaching L2 learners of Japanese the notion of lexical aspect, and how the aspectual meaning of -teiru is determined by lexical aspect. The results showed a positive effect of explicit form-focused instruction for the beginner group, but not for the intermediate group. The findings suggest that explicit linguistic explanation may facilitate the learning of Japanese imperfective -teiru, at least in the early stages of learning.

It has been claimed that there is a universal interaction between grammatical aspect and the inherent lexical aspect of verbs. In other words, in many languages of the world, a given grammatical aspect co-occurs naturally with some verb types but not with others. This chapter tests this claim with Brunei Malay and with children acquiring Brunei Malay as their L1 to determine whether or not the lexical aspect of verbs affects the comprehension of grammatical aspect. Although Brunei Malay is a language that does not have a grammaticalised system for marking tense, it has aspect markers available to its speakers. We identified five markers available in Brunei Malay namely sudah, baru, lakat, masih and tangah, and we tested children's comprehension of these aspect markers using sentence-to-picture matching exercises, and we looked specifically at the interaction of these aspect markers and the lexical aspect of the verbs. The participants were 108 children aged 3, 4 and 5. The findings suggest that the semantic features of verbs (like telicity or durativity) affect children’s comprehension of aspect markers and may be used to provide support for the Aspect Hypothesis.

In Cicero’s letters, vado is allegedly used as a synonym of eo. However, an analysis of vado in Classical Latin points rather to the fact that this verb displays distinctive features such as [ingressive] or [durative] and has a place of its own as a functional by-form of eo. Its role in Classical Latin can be fully understood only within the whole evolutionary framework of motion verbs, primarily eo and venio, where vado shows a specific profile in terms of lexical aspect and textual exploitation. Moreover, in a passage from Martial vado shows signs of keeping pace with eo in terms of deictic orientation. Selon des hypothèses, vado serait utilisé dans la correspondance de Cicéron comme un synonyme de eo. L’analyse de vado en latin classique met en évidence que ce verbe présente des traits distinctifs tels que [ingressif] ou [duratif] et qu’il a une place à part au niveau fonctionnel. Son rôle ne peut être pleinement compris que dans le cadre global d’évolution des verbes de mouvement, notamment celui de eo et de venio, où vado possède un caractère spécifique en termes d’aspect lexical et d’exploitation textuelle. En outre, un passage de Martial suggère que vado commence aussi à suivre eo quant à l’orientation déictique.

Purpose Many typically developing children first use inflections such as – ed with verb predicates whose meanings are compatible with the functions of the inflection (e.g., using – ed when describing events of brief duration with clear end points, such as dropped ). This tendency is assumed to be beneficial for development. In this study, the authors examine whether preschool-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a similar tendency. Method Sixteen children in each of three groups participated—children with SLI, typically developing children matched for age (TD–A), and younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD–MLU). The children described actions in contexts that promoted either past tense – ed or progressive aspect – ing in past contexts. Half of the verb predicates referred to events of brief duration with distinct endpoints (e.g., drop ), and half referred to events of considerable duration with less distinct points of termination (e.g., play ). Results Both the TD–A children and the TD–MLU children used – ed with verb predicates of the first type more consistently than they did with verb predicates of the second type. They showed the reverse pattern for – ing . The children with SLI did not show any effects according to the verb predicate type. However, although the children with SLI made less overall use of – ed than did both groups of TD children, they differed only from the TD–A children in their overall use of – ing . Conclusion Difficulties with tense-related morphology may be compounded in children with SLI if they fail to make use of associations between the lexical aspect of verb predicates and the grammatical function of the accompanying inflections. The authors argue that the advantages of using these associations as a starting point in acquisition may be especially important in the case of – ed . Additional studies of children with SLI are clearly needed, including those that employ longitudinal, naturalistic data.

Many grammatical issues of Archaic and Medieval Chinese still lack a comprehensive analysis. The book provides the first thorough investigation of the syntactic and semantic constraints of the linguistic categories tense and aspect and their relation with the lexical aspect of the verb in Han period Chinese. The author uncovers fascinating details of a language with a highly restricted verbal morphology.

According to the aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), perfective morphology emerges before imperfective morphology, it is first used in telic predicates (achievements and accomplishments) and it later extends to atelic predicates (activities and states). The opposite development is hypothesized for imperfective morphology. This study proposes to investigate the emergence of preterite and imperfect morphology in Catalan to examine if the aspectual characteristics of predicates can account for the emergence of morphology and also appropriate use. Past verbal forms in narratives produced by three multilingual learners of Catalan as a foreign language were coded for appropriateness of use, morphology, and lexical aspect. An aspectual analysis of the data provided support for the aspect hypothesis, because achievement and accomplishment predicates in general were inflected for preterite morphology more frequently than were activity and state predicates, and the opposite was found for the emergence of imperfect morphology. The aspectual trends, however, varied for individual learners, tasks, and developmental stages. An analysis of the appropriate use of preterite and imperfect forms showed that morphology was used appropriately in almost all contexts. Prototypical combinations of morphology and aspect tended to be used more appropriately than nonprototypical combinations, as supported by other studies (Cadierno, 2000; Camps, 2002; Giacalone-Ramat, 2002).

Le is a functional morpheme in Mandarin, which can appear in two places, immediately after the verb (verb-le) or in a sentence-final position (sentence-le). Traditionally, verb-le is often referred to as a perfective aspect marker denoting completion, while sentence-le is generally considered as a sentence final particle which signals a change-of-state meaning. Based on Smith’s aspect theory, which calls the grammatical aspect the viewpoint aspect and the lexical aspect the situation aspect, this paper argues that both les are perfective aspect markers derived from one super-le. Besides, it also compares le with guo, which is another post-verbal perfective aspect marker whose aspectual status has been well-established in the literature, and points out that guo differs from verb-le in that it always denotes the completion of event. It is further argued that the reason why le conveys distinct meanings lies in its position in the sentence. And thus, the conclusion is drawn as: although verb-le and sentence-le denote different meanings, they are essentially the same in terms of the three following aspects: (1) Both of them are perfective aspect viewpoint markers. (2) They have the same temporal interpretations. (3) They show the same variance from guo. Therefore, there is just one le which is a perfective aspect marker. If it is placed after the verb, it will have the terminative reading. If it is in the sentence-final position, it will form a Perfect and have a change-of-state reading. Given such difference, a syntactic representation of le in the clausal structure is proposed, in which verb-le is generated in the AspP lower within vP while sentence-le resides in the AspP adjoined to TP. The reason why guo cannot occur with verb-le is the different aspectual meanings they convey. Guo is concerned with the experience the subject has while sentence-le is about the state change.

Research on the topic of aktionsart has been exponentially growing in the last half century. Competing theories and approaches are still under hot discussion today. This work is set to offer a basic insight into the knowledge that has been gathered to this point about the notion of aktionsart. It is a comparative study that examines how verbs are classified in terms of aktionsart in Russian and English, and whether they are treated differently. Despite apparent differences, the data suggests that they are not. El concepte de aktionsart ha estat al focus de recerca de nombroses investigacions de la darrera meitat del segle anterior. Les teories sobre aquest concepte són disputades fins avui dia. Aquest escrit es proposa oferir una introducció a les bases del aktionsart. Es tracta d'un estudi comparatiu que examina el tractament dels verbs en Rus i Anglès en relació al aspecte lèxic. Tot i que pugui semblar que hi existeixen diferencies aparents, les dades suggereixen que els dos idiomes tracten el concepte d'actionsart de manera més semblant que diferent.

This paper investigates the effect of verb semantics on the variable use of aspectuo-temporal morphology by the advanced learner of French. Using the Aspect Hypothesis as a heuristic to test the extent to which the advanced learner overrides the effect of verb semantics in aspectual contexts where the verb assumes a non-prototypical value, the study examines the interaction between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in order to identify which factor exerts a stronger influence on the learner’s aspectuo-temporal choice. Results suggest that lexical aspect continues to constrain the advanced learner’s aspectuo-temporal system, such that non-prototypical marking poses greater difficulty than prototypical marking.

Pozicijos konstrukcijos yra įdomus ir nevienalytis reiškinys tiek reikšmės (semantinės struktūros), tiek raiškos atžvilgiu. Jos gali perteikti ir rezultatyvinę, ir depiktyvinę reikšmę, be to, pasitaiko atvejų, kai šių reikšmių atskirti neįmanoma – jų skirtumas yra neutralizuotas. Kas dėl raiškos, antrinis predikatas pozicijos konstrukcijose dažniausiai reiškiamas būdvardžiu, tačiau ne taip jau retai pasitaiko ir prieveiksmis. Straipsnyje, remiantis iš „Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstyno“ surinktais duomenimis, stengiamasi nustatyti, kokie veiksniai lemia vienokią ar kitokią konstrukcijos reikšmę ir raišką. Sekant Holvoeto iškelta mintimi, teigiama, kad konstrukcijos semantinei struktūrai daugiausia įtakos daro veiksmažodžio leksinis veikslas ir jo leksinė reikšmė. Tačiau, kaip nustatyta iš duomenų, raiškos pasirinkimą lemia jau ne veiksmažodžio, o paties antrinio predikato leksiniai bruožai: vienos laikyseną reiškiančios sąvokos yra labiau orientuotos į veiksmo dalyvį ir dėl to paprastai perteikiamos būdvardžiu, kitos – labiau orientuotos į veiksmą ir todėl gali būti dažniau išreikštos prieveiksmiu. Straipsnio pabaigoje pateikiamas paaiškinimas, kodėl pozicijos konstrukcijų raiška apskritai įvairuoja. The paper examines Lithuanian posture constructions such as stovi stačias ‘stands uprightʼ which have been briefly discussed in Holvoet (2008). However, a more exhaustive examination has not been carried out yet. The discussion is based on 1002 examples from The Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language. Some of the secondary predicates occurring in posture constructions exhibit semantic features of either resultatives or depictives, while the others cannot be clearly judged as resultatives or depictives since they show both kinds of features. The encoding of the secondary predicates also oscillates between the depictive and the resultative marking. Thus the purpose of the paper is to establish the factors which determine different semantic interpretations and different formal marking of the construction. The author follows Holvoet (2008) in assuming that the semantic structure of the constructions depends on the semantic features of the verb. It is proposed that the lexical aspect and the lexical meaning of the verb determine a resultative, a depictive or a "neutralized" ("intermediate") interpretation of the construction. As the data show, the secondary predicate is usually encoded by an adjective (depictive-like marking), however, sometimes it is expressed by an adverb (resultative-like marking) as well. It is assumed that the choice between the adjective and the adverb is determined by the lexical features of the secondary predicate rather than of the verb. Some of the posture notions seem to be more oriented towards the participant of an event and thus opt to be expressed by an adjective, while others are more oriented towards the event and therefore are encoded by an adverb. It is hypothesized that the reason for the oscillating marking lies in the constructions with a neutralized meaning. The cases which are ambiguous between the depictive and the resultative meaning constitute a precondition for establishing the double marking. This twofold marking is then extended to the constructions which carry clearly the depictive or the resultative meaning.

Multilingual generation in machine translation (MT) requires a knowledge organization that facilitates the task of lexical choice, i.e. selection of lexical units to be used in the generation of a target-language sentence. This paper investigates the extent to which lexicalization patterns involving the lexical aspect feature [+telic] may be used for translating events and states among languages. Telicity has been correlated syntactically with both transitivity and unaccusativity, and semantically with Talmy's ‘path’ of a motion event, the representation of which characterizes languages parametrically. Taking as our starting point the syntactic/semantic classification in Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations, we examine the relation between telicity and the syntactic contexts, or alternations, outlined in this work, identifying systematic relations between the lexical aspect features and the semantic components that potentiate these alternations. Representing lexical aspect — particularly telicity — is therefore crucial for the tasks of lexical choice and syntactic realization. Having enriched the data in Levin (by correlating the syntactic alternations (Part I) and semantic verb classes (Part II) and marking them for telicity) we assign to verbs lexical semantic templates (LSTs). We then demonstrate that it is possible from these templates to build a large-scale repository for lexical conceptual structures which encode meaning components that correspond to different values of the telicity feature. The LST framework preserves both semantic content and semantic structure (following Grimshaw during the processes of lexical choice and syntactic realization. Application of this model identifies precisely where the Knowledge Representation component may profitably augment our rules of composition, to identify cases where the interlingua underlying the source language sentence must be either reduced or modified in order to produce an appropriate target language sentence.

1. List of contributors 2. Abbreviations 3. Impersonals and Beyond in Slavic (by Guiraud-Weber, Marguerite) 4. Section I: Morphosyntax 5. Binding and Morphology Revisited (by Franks, Steven L.) 6. Possessor Raising and Slavic clitics (by Zimmerling, Anton) 7. The Slavonic Languages and the Development of the Antipassive Marker (by Janic, Katarzyna) 8. Clitic SE in Romance and Slavonic revisited (by Marelj, Marijana) 9. Section II: Syntactical relations 10. The Lazy Speaker and the Fascination of Emptiness: Colloquial Russian from a Typological Perspective (by Weiss, Daniel) 11. Is the Polish Verb isc an Auxiliary to be?: A Corpus-Based Study of the Construction isc + Infinitive (by Sikora, Dorota) 12. Towards Evidentiality Markers in Albanian and Macedonian Bilingual Political Discourse (by Makartsev, Maxim) 13. A strange variant of Russian ctoby-construction: Irreality and tense-marking (by Letuchiy, Alexander) 14. Section III: Impersonal constructions 15. Impersonal Constructions in Serbian: A description within a Meaning Text linguistic model (by Milicevic, Jasmina) 16. Interpretation and voice in Polish SIE and -NO/-TO constructions (by Krzek, Malgorzata) 17. Dative-infinitive constructions in Russian: Taxonomy and semantics (by Israeli, Alina) 18. On the Nature of Dative Arguments in Russian Constructions with "Predicatives" (by Say, Sergey) 19. Russian Adversity Impersonals and Split Ergativity (by Schlund, Katrin) 20. Section IV: Lexical semantics 21. Morphological and lexical aspect in Russian deverbal nominalizations (by de Valdivia, Gloria) 22. Lexical synonymy within the semantic field POWER (by Dobrovol'skij, Dmitrij) 23. Collocations with nominal quantifiers: Semantics and combinability (by Beliakov, Vladimir) 24. Polysemy Patterns in Russian Adjectives and Adverbs: A corpus-oriented database (by Reznikova, Tatiana) 25. Language index 26. Name index 27. Subject index

In the semantic literature lexical aspect is often treated as a property of VPs or even of whole sentences. Does the interpretation of lexical aspect – contrary to the incrementality assumption commonly made in psycholinguistics – have to wait until the verb and all its arguments are present? To address this issue, we conducted an offline study, two self-paced reading experiments and an eyetracking experiment to investigate aspectual mismatch and aspectual coercion in German sentences while manipulating the position of the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Our findings provide evidence that mismatch detection and aspectual repair depend on a complete verb-argument structure. When the verb didn’t receive all its (minimally required) arguments no mismatch or coercion effects showed up at the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Effects were delayed until a later point after all the arguments had been encountered. These findings have important consequences for semantic theory and for processing accounts of aspectual semantics. As far as semantic theory is concerned, it has to model lexical aspect as a supralexical property coming only into play at the sentence level. For theories of semantic processing the results are even more striking because they indicate that (at least some) semantic phenomena are processed on a more global level than it would be expected assuming incremental semantic interpretation.

Nuestro objetivo es demostrar que en español el verbo llegar posee dos interpretaciones en función del Aspecto de los predicados en los que aparece: inacusativa combinado con sujetos no volitivos e inergativa combinado con sujetos volitivos. Primero esbozaremos el fenómeno de la Inacusatividad y describiremos los grupos VCE y VEA. A continuación, propondremos una justificada reducción del grupo de los VM a cuatro verbos semántico-cognitivamente primitivos, entre los que se encuentra llegar, para finalmente exponer las pruebas que sustentan sus dos posibles interpretaciones. Our aim is to prove that the verb ‘llegar’ (arrive) possesses two possible interpretations in Spanish according to the lexical aspect of the predicates in which appears: unaccusative, combined with no-volitional subjects and unergative, combined with volitional subjects. Firstly, we will outline the Unaccusativity phenomenon and we will describe the VCS (Verbs of Change of State) and VEA (Verbs of Existence or Appearance) groups. Later on, we will propose a justified reduction of MV (Motion Verbs) group to four primitive semantic-cognitively verbs, among which is the verb ‘llegar’, in order to present, finally, the evidences that underpin its two possible interpretations.

In this paper we propose a semantic type-driven account of verb-formation patterns in Panyjima. By offering an explicit theory for the construal of semantically simplex event descriptions from morphologically complex verbal stems, we flesh out intuitions dating back to Clark and Clark (1979) about the role of derivational morphology in the interpretation of derived verbs, especially denominal verbs. This latter point is of particular relevance to a general theory of verb meaning (inclusive of, but not limited to, Aktionsart/lexical aspect), as most formal theories of lexical semantics have been primarily developed for languages with a rich verbal lexicon. By contrast, Australian languages often have a much smaller verbal lexicon and rely more heavily on productive processes of verbalization. The challenge we intend to meet is to provide a formal analysis that matches the productive morphology of the language under investigation. We offer an implementation couched within the Type Composition Logic (TCL) of...