A widely adopted classification of aspectual type is that based on Vendler’s (1967) four-way aspectual classification of verbs into accomplishments, achievements, activities and statives. Moreover, some have assumed, either explicitly or implicitly, that this aspectual classification is universal (see, for instance, Borer 2005, Krifka 1992, Filip 1999). That is, each language has predicates tha...

The Chinese negation marker bu ‘not’ is analyzed as a clitic-like element in the literature (Huang 1988; Ernst 1995; etc.) in order to explain why it cannot co-occur with (i) the perfective marker -le or (ii) manner phrases in the V-de construction. Huang (1988) assumes that bu must cliticize onto auxiliaries/modals or the following verb, and since bu cliticizing directly to a verb induces a ‘‘...

The paper shows how the semantically underspecified imperfective aspect in Russian becomes associated with counterfactual complete events in specific contexts, notably in chess annotations (Restan 1989), while the perfective invariably denotes factual complete events. The counterfactual flavour of the construction invites a comparison with more standard counterfactual conditionals, including so...

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...

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...

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 tense-aspect system of Breton, a continental Celtic language, is largely under-described. This paper has two main goals. First, it gives an overview the numerous verbal morphosyntactic constructions with aim evaluating how they carve up domain. second goal to zero in on one particular set constructions, namely, perfect-like constructions. In particular, investigates use present perfect narr...

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 comprehension study on aspectual form-to-meaning correspondences set out to see if the presence of aspect as morphological category in a language makes the acquisition of aspectual form-meaning pairs relatively easy in comparison to a language that lacks such an aspect category. In Polish, aspect is a grammatical category—all verbs are marked as perfective or imperfective—and tense is mark...