Throughout this paper, the semantic domain under scrutiny will be designated by the acronym ATAM (i.e., Actionality / Temporality / Aspect / Modality). This involves a modification of the usual practice, where TAM (or TMA) is routinely used. As will soon become clear, however, the actionality category cannot be neglected, considering its role in the semantics and acquisition of tense and aspect...

Usually writing teachers feel commitment to provide their learners with corrective feedback (CF) to their linguistic errors. The study investigated whether two types of written corrective feedback, indirect focused corrective feedback and indirect unfocused corrective feedback, produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by high intermediate EFL learners. In this stud...

There is substantial debate over the mental representation of regular past tense forms in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) processing. Specifically, the controversy revolves around the nature of morphologically complex forms such as the past tense –ed in English and how morphological structures of such forms are represented in the mental lexicon. This study focuses on the resul...

We describe a “distant annotation” method where we mark up the semantic tense, event type, and modality of Chinese events via a word-aligned parallel corpus. We first map Chinese verbs to their English counterparts via word alignment, and then annotate the resulting English text spans with coarse-grained categories for semantic tense, event type, and modality that we believe apply to both Engli...

Tense prediction can be useful for many language processing tasks, such as temporal inference and machine translation. In this paper, we investigate using diverse contextual features for Chinese tense prediction under a statistical learning framework. Because of lack of annotated training data, we propose to leverage ChineseEnglish parallel corpora to automatically generate reference tense for ...

Polysemy is a major characteristic of natural languages. Like words, syntactic forms can have several meanings. Understanding the correct meaning of a syntactic form is of great importance to many NLP applications. In this paper we address an important type of syntactic polysemy – the multiple possible senses of tense syntactic forms. We make our discussion concrete by introducing the task of T...

Recent studies on perceptual learning have indicated that listeners use intermediate units between the acoustic input and lexical representations of words. The same paradigm may also reveal the nature of these intermediate units based on patterns of generalization of learning. We here test whether learning generalizes to other units of the same underlying or surface representation. This was ach...

We address the problem of automatically inferring the tense of events in Chinese text. We use a new corpus annotated with Chinese semantic tense information and other implicit Chinese linguistic information using a “distant annotation” method. We propose three improvements over a relatively strong baseline method – a statistical learning method with extensive feature engineering. First, we add ...

Quebec French close vowels /iyu/ are regularly lengthened in syllables closed by the consonants /ʁvzʒ/. The quality of these variants is subject to debate: they are variously described as tense, slightly unstable or diphthongised. It has also been suggested that they would be tense before /vzʒ/, but lax before /ʁ/, with a concomitant diphthongisation. The present study aims to provide an acoust...

Acoustic evidence suggests that contemporary Seoul Korean may be developing a tonal system, which is arising in the context of a nearly completed change in how speakers use voice onset time (VOT) to mark the language’s distinction among tense, lax and aspirated stops.Data from 36 native speakers of varying ages indicate that while VOT for tense stops has not changed since the 1960s, VOT differe...