Aspectual contrasts in the Englishpresent tense revisited

Aspectual Entities and Tense in Discourse

Linguistic expressions form interesting patterns in discourse. In the domain of temporality, the morphemes of tense and aspectual viewpoint pattern significantly within a discourse. Shifts of viewpoint and tense are often associated with shifts of direction, and with the distinction between foreground and background. One important reason for this effect is that aspectual viewpoint and tense for...

Aspectual influences on early tense comprehension.

This study investigated the aspect first hypothesis which claims that children initially use verbal morphology to mark aspect and not tense. Experiment 1 tested 46 two- and three-year-old children's comprehension of tense as it is marked in the auxiliary system using a sentence-to-scene matching task. Children were presented with multiple performances of the same event and asked where a charact...

The lexicon , grammar , and the past tense : Dissociation revisited

Emerging temporality: past tense and temporal/aspectual markers in Spanish-speaking children's intra-conversational narratives.

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense, temporal/aspectual markers and narrative components we...

The Role of Caregivers’ Tense and Aspectual Distinctions on Children’s Later Acquisition

Grammaticalized expressions of time are found across languages. In particular, temporal information can be conveyed through tense morphology, which indicates an event’s location of time based on a referent event (Comrie, 1985) and through aspect morphology, which indicates “ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (e.g., is an event ongoing or completed; Comrie, 1976, ...