How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment o...

This work investigates first-language (L1) influence on second-language (L2) acquisition of embedded aspect, comparing participants with homogeneous L1 background (Russian) in Greece (L2 Standard Modern Greek) and Cyprus (L2 Cypriot Greek), where verb complementation takes a finite form instead of an infinitival as in Russian. The focus of the experimental study is on those embedded sentential ...

Perfectivity is often assumed to entail the completion of the event described by eventdenoting stems and their arguments. Although some scholars have noted that perfective markers do not always entail completion, their formal definitions contradict their informal descriptions. We show that these traditional models of perfective aspect cannot account for the aspectual system of Thai. In Thai, pe...

The main goal of this study is to prove that two modal mechanisms Greenberg (2003) postulated for English indefinite singular (IS) and bare plural (BP) generics in the nominal domain are mirrored in Polish perfective and imperfective generics in the event domain. On the basis of Oosterhof’s (2006) argumentation, I justify the distinction between the GEN and the HAB intensional operators. With t...

Aspectual composition occurs when grammatical aspect (perfective and imperfective) and eventuality types (accomplishments, achievements, processes, states) carried by the verb phrase combine to trigger particular meanings. This aspectual composition may change the denotation of the eventuality type resulting to aspectual shifts An instance of this phenomenon is found in Modern Greek, where ther...

T T T Th h h he e e e Q Q Q Qu u u ua a a an n n nt t t ti i i iz z z za a a at t t ti i i io o o on n n n P P P Pu u u uz z z zz z z zl l l le e e e 1 1 1 1 I I I In n n nt t t tr r r ro o o od d d du u u uc c c ct t t ti i i io o o on n n n Recent discussions of Slavic perfective aspect commonly make two assumptions: First, perfective verb forms are semantically quantized, or, to use other te...

Abstract This paper addresses the relationship between habituals, including expressions of unbounded repetition, and verbal aspect. It is often assumed that past events are conceptualized as habitually occurring or repeated in an way inherently expressed by imperfective verb forms languages with A crosslinguistic analysis provided habituals perfective aspect, based on 36 from different language...

We present a manually constructed seed lexicon encoding the inferential profiles of French event selecting predicates across different uses. The inferential profile (Karttunen, 1971a) of a verb is designed to capture the inferences triggered by the use of this verb in context. It reflects the influence of the clause-embedding verb on the factuality of the event described by the embedded clause....