We examined how several semantic richness variables contribute to verb meaning, across a number of tasks. Because verbs can vary in tense, and the manner in which tense is coded (i.e., regularity), we also examined how these factors moderated the effects of semantic richness. In Experiment 1 we found that age of acquisition (AoA), valence, arousal and embodiment predicted faster response times ...

This paper outlines a framework of the temporal interpretation in Chinese with a special focus on complement and relative clauses. It argues that not only Chinese has no morphological tenses but there is no need to resort to covert semantic features under a tense node in order to interpret time in Chinese. Instead, it utilizes various factors such as the information provided by default aspect, ...

In this paper we argue that Prior and Reichenbach are best viewed as allies, not antagonists. We do so by combining the central insights of Prior and Reichenbach in the framework of hybrid tense logic. This overcomes a well-known defect of Reichenbach’s tense schema, namely that it gives multiple representations to sentences in the future perfect and the future-in-the-past. It also makes it eas...

This paper explores the mapping of voice quality to affect, for a synthesised tense – lax voice continuum. Two questions are of interest. Firstly, over such a continuum, do listeners’ attributions of affect change in a continuous or in a more categorical way? Secondly, might discreetly different affects emerge at different points in the continuum: specifically, might a moderately tense voice cu...