This paper examines a non-canonical morphophonological vowel alternation in the roots of Russian verbs that is conditioned by aspectual information (derived imperfectivization). This aspectual morpheme is usually expressed as a suffix, but in the forms of interest appears as a vocalic nucleus in the root (whereas there is no vocalic nucleus in the perfective form). In a manner broadly compatibl...

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 aim of this paper is to account for the behaviour of Polish pronom-inal clitics in tense auxiliary constructions. In particular, we discuss the phenomenon known as clitic climbing (CC) and provide its HPSG account. Unlike Romance or Germanic languages, Polish employs only one tense auxiliary verb by´c 'be'. The future tense of imperfective verbs is formed with the strong form of the auxilia...

This article discusses different modes of expressing ingressivity in the Slavic languages—the grammatical expression of ingressivity (by means of imperfective verb forms) and its lexical expression (by means of the use of stat' as an ingressive phase verb or perfective procedural verbs prefixed with za-)—and relates them to one another as two competing systems. It is shown that these phenomena ...

In this article I want to present a new approach to the semantics of the English progressive and show how the same ideas can also be applied to the semantics of the Finnish partitive case. In nearly all formal semantical theories of the progressive I am familiar with the progressive is formalized with the aid of a sentential operator. I suggest that if we formalize the progressive as a predicat...

This paper discusses possible parallels between change of location and change of state, involved in locomotive (Dmotion), change of state, and creation/removal verbs, examining cross-linguistic typological variation in lexical patterning and syntactic behaviors.1 Spatial uses of prepositions are closely connected with temporal uses, although the latter are more abstract and limited because of d...

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...

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 & ...

Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with...