1. Outline of the argument The puzzle of English until is well-known. Karttunen 1974 argues that until is ambiguous between a durative and a punctual negative polarity (NPI) meaning. Mittwoch 1977 claims that there is no ambiguity and that the two meanings are due to scope differences: NPI-until is in fact until above negation. Mittwoch's account relies crucially on the assumption that negation...

It is claimed in the literature that the perfective marker -guo has the following semantic properties: discontinuity, repeatability/reversibility, and partiality, which contrast with the continuation and totality properties of the perfective marker -le. Previous analyses adopt a purely semantic approach to account for the above properties of -guo and -le, and the role played by pragmatics is no...

Previous research in child language acquisition identifies discrepancies between child and adult use of verbal inflectional morphology In this paper, we consider a case of partial undergeneralization where children's use of the-ed and-ing endings seems constrained by the aspectual class of the host verb. Children, more than adults, seem reluctant to generalize the imperfective morpheme to state...

The paper deals with interpretative verbs as established by (Apresjan 2004) and interpretative converb constructions as established by (Boguslavskij 1977) and afterwards discussed in a cross-linguistic typological perspective in (Haspelmath & König 1995). It is shown that Apresjan’s approach offers a key to the semantics of converb (DEEPR) constructions. Special attention is paid to converb con...

The term ‘actuality entailment’ was coined by Rajesh Bhatt in his 1999 dissertation to describe the implicative inference that arises when ability modals combine with perfective aspect. This article investigates the nature of this inference and the contributions of aspect and modality, by surveying the environments in which it is found. Prior to Bhatt’s dissertation, the literatures on aspect a...

The present study explores the production of bound morphemes in the speech of a nine-year old Greek child with moderate hearing impairment (HI). Data were obtained through the child’s responses to subtests from the Diagnostic Verbal IQ Test (DVIQ, Stavrakaki et al. 2000) and samples of her speech. The analysis concerned the inflection of nouns, adjectives and verbs. The results showed that, eve...

By analyzing corpus data, we have shown that the tendencies of restricting perfective past marking to Accomplishments and Achievements and imperfective marking to Statives and Activities as described by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai, 1991; Andersen & Shirai, 1996), undesirable in the acquisition of various languages, are desirable in the acquisition of a language like Chinese, because these ten...

This paper will provide an account for the existence of pairs of deverbal nominals with –age and –ée giving rise to event readings. We first study the argument structure of the bases and of the derived nominals, and establish the general tendencies. We further examine the Aktionsart of the nominalizations and of the verbal bases. We conclude that these levels of investigation are not sufficient...

The Tongan suffix -‘i has been variously analyzed as a transitivizer, a passive suffix, a perfective suffix, and a modifier of verbal semantics. It has a variety of effects on the valency and aspect of the verb to which it is affixed. The One Form/One Meaning Principle (Johns 1992) suggests that these various effects should be linked together. I show that the apparently divergent functions of -...