Some studies on the L1 acquisition of aspect in various child languages have discovered that imperfective is acquired later than perfective aspect, whereas others find early adult-like performance. A variety explanations has been advanced, particularly problems (i) with semantics combination telic predicates, (ii) inferring intended temporal antecedent a discourse, and (iii) reasoning about an ...

This paper analyzes the argument structure of Yucatec Mayan. In line with traditional assumptions but in contrast to more recent proposals, we show that Yucatec has ergative morphology but not a split-ergative system. For intransitive verbs there is a strict correlation between aspect and the type of linker: they take ergative clitics in the imperfect, but nominative suffixes in the perfect. Mo...

The validity of the traditional approach to the semantics of verbal aspect in Russian based on the features “boundedness” and “totality” is questioned. It is argued that these features are not inherent in the meaning of all perfective verbs and cannot be regarded as the semantic invariant of aspectuality. A different approach is suggested, based on the analysis of morphological and syntactic ev...

This study investigated the role that agency information plays in children's early interpretations of grammatical aspect morphology, in particular, the progressive -ing and simple past forms. Fifty-nine children (two-, four- and five-year olds) were presented with a forced-choice sentence-to-scene matching task very similar to the one used by Weist and colleagues (Weist, 1991; Weist, Wysocka & ...

THIS STUDY considers some of the categories commonly associated with the notion ''auxiliary'' from the point of view of Modern Hebrew. As background, a characterization of auxiliaries as syntactically and semantically DEPENDENT elements is suggested (Section I. I), and an attempt is made to show why many Hebrew studies to date have taken rather too unconstrained a view of the notion by extendin...

Readers actively construct representational models of meaning when reading text, and they do so by drawing on a range of kinds of information, from the specifi c linguistic forms of the sentences to knowledge about how the world works (Ferretti, Kutas, & McRae, 2007 ; Madden & Zwaan, 2003 ). The present set of studies focused on how grammatical aspect is integrated into a situation model and ho...

Abstract Perfective stem allomorphy and stress are morphological traits which interact in complex ways Romance verbal inflection. This article surveys the whole range of variation these across varieties, typologizes observed interactions between two, examines attested unattested possibilities. A comparison modern-day original Latin systems suggests that there is a strong pan-Romance bias agains...

Like other Numic languages (Uto-Aztecan), Northern Paiute has a morphological process of durative gemination, which conveys some type of aspect. I describe the semantics of durative gemination in Northern Paiute, locating it within an emerging typology of imperfective aspect from the formal semantics literature. Like the imperfective aspect in other languages, durative gemination has an event-i...

In this paper we address the common claim that perfective verbs presuppose the initial phase (or a process part) of events denoted by them, and assert their final phase (or a culmination part), while the meaning of imperfective verbs lacks both these components. Different formulations of this claim have been proposed by Padučeva (1996, 2011) and Romanova (2006) for Russian, and by Dočekal and K...