In this paper, we analyze a certain process of Verb to Infl raising in the Edo language of Nigeria. Verb raising has not been recognized in previous work on Edoid languages, such as Agheyisi 1990. From a theoretical perspective, its primary interest comes from the fact that it takes place only in one tense. As a result, it is easy to form minimal pairs with and without verb raising in the same ...

The paper was delivered as a commentary upon Michael Brent's presentation "Acquisition of Subcategorization Frames Using Aggregated Evidence from Local Syntactic Cues" to the Conference on Acquisition of the Mental Lexicon, IRCS, University of Pennsylvania, January 1992. It argues in support of using statistical techniques like Brent's to minimize the consequences of errors and misanalyses, but...

In this paper, I will discuss an irrealis-construction in Russian, which poses non-trivial problems for a compositional analysis of tense, aspect and mood (the categories subsumed under the abbreviation TAM). The past tense morphology on the verb – in absence of a semantic PAST operator – is argued to be licensed by an IRREALIS operator. This concord phenomenon will be accounted for in terms ag...

This paper investigates the limited attainment of adult compared to child language acquisition in terms of learned attention to morphological cues. It replicates Ellis and Sagarra in demonstrating short-term learned attention in the acquisition of temporal reference in Latin, and it extends the investigation using eye-tracking indicators to determine the extent to which these biases are overt o...

This paper focuses on a theory of tense and aspect the representation of time in natural language that attempts a formal representation of the relevant lin guistic devices as implication rules in rst order logic It presents a rich ontology as far as verb aspect is concerned distinguishing between complex patterns and vagueness Examples and conclusions are drawn from the com parison between Engl...

This experiment investigates the acquisition of (true) light verb constructions (in the sense of Kearns 1988/2002) as well as other constructions that involve a light verb in Cypriot Greek. Focusing on the acquisition of the light verb kamno ‘do/make’, this study aims to identify (i) whether light verb constructions are more frequent in Cypriot Greek than in Standard Modern Greek, (ii) what the...

This paper takes a closer look at the attraction properties of T. It highlights an empirically attested distinction between rich agreement inflection, exhibited by null-subject languages, and rich tense inflection, found in Romance, but not Germanic, and argues for the syntactic relevance of this distinction. We propose a novel typology of the ways in which T's featural requirements can be sati...

Abstract Temporal/aspectual morphology often serves as a diagnostic for actional classes. Bantu languages are known their highly developed tense, aspect (and mood) systems. The East Ruvu of Tanzania unusual in that they exhibit decidedly reduced set temporal/aspectual morphemes. This paper contributes to the growing body research on actionality showing despite not being encoded overtly, perfect...