The aim of this study is to investigate the interaction between viewpoint aspect and argument realization. More specifically, we examine the correlation of +/ perfective verb forms in Greek and null objects with indefinite, non-specific interpretation. It is argued that although null objects are possible with both perfective and imperfective verbs, imperfective verbs favour object omission more...

While most studies of generalised verbal –s report the effects of the Northern Subject Rule (subject type and adjacency between the subject and the verb condition verbal –s), work on this feature in Vernacular Newfoundland English (VNE) report a lack of NSR effects. Instead, verbal –s in VNE is associated with habitual aspect and verb stativity. This paper integrates generative and variationist...

In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative ...

In a story completion study involving transfer-of-possession passages (John handed a book to Bob. He _____), Stevenson et al. (1994) identified a pronoun interpretation preference that is compatible with two possible explanations: a superficial thematic role bias for Goals over Sources, and a deeper event structure bias toward focusing on the end state of such events. To distinguish these hypot...

The vast majority of prefixed roots fall into the perfective class, although there are some perfectives that are not prefixed. Imperfective verb forms are either unprefixed altogether, or possess a suffixal marker of imperfectivity (generally called the ‘secondary’ imperfective). The analytical problem is this: despite this apparently uniform effect on the interpretation of the tense morphology...

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...

Information structure is normally considered to be orthogonal to the syntaxsemantics interface. However, in this paper, I argue that aspectual operators in Russian, notably the imperfective aspect with complete event interpretations, are sensitive to information structure. My goal is to show how the imperfective aspect can be used either to assert or presuppose the existence of a complete event...

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...

This paper provides two puzzles for a theory of aspect. The first concerns the quirky behavior of the Russian imperfective with regard to its culmination properties: it seems to function like the perfect aspect in certain cases, but like the progressive in others. The other puzzle concerns how the Russian imperfective constrains the temporal location of a described event: it relates distinct ev...

This paper investigates the developmental process through which L2 learners acquire two „imperfective‟ aspect markers in Korean, -ko iss(progressive and resultative) and -a iss(resultative) which attempts to identify language-general and language-specific patterns in the L2 acquisition of the Korean imperfective aspect by Japanese learners by comparing the results with previous research. Study ...