This paper offers an analysis of a robustly attested semantic change in which progressive markers “spontaneously” emerge in languages, become entrenched in the grammatical system, and diachronically generalize by turning into imperfective markers. The pattern is cyclic in that the generalization is often followed by a re-emergence of new progressive markers. The analysis has a semantic componen...

3 An Introduction to IQ 3 3.1 The Homogeneity Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.2 Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.3 Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.4 Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.5 An Example IQ Deriv...

The article addresses verbal aspect in the acquisition of Latvian as a foreign language. textbooks both and other languages, well Japanese learners’ writings are analysed to explore this topic. main issue is use verbs expressing aspectual opposition perfective / imperfective, inchoative stative, Aktionsart prefixed verbs. Verbal an implicit category. It one few categories described grammars but...

The present paper sketches how the event calculus of Kowalski and Sergot may be extended to address the problems of aspectual composition and the imperfective paradox. The primary extensions include the introduction of additional types of eventualities and a distinction between actual and non-actual entities. The calculus has been implemented as a logic program, and the inferences automatically...

Sphere semantics is based on Tarski’s geometry of solids. It is evoked here to provide semantics for natural-language aspect, in particular the English progressive. Three virtues are argued for: (i) The approach extends interval semantics and omits its pitfalls, (ii) the semantics solves the imperfective puzzle, and (iii) the solution does not appeal to the strategy of eventual outcomes.

Like other Numic languages (Uto-Aztecan), Northern Paiute has a morphological process of durative gemination, which conveys some type of aspect. I describe the semantics of durative gemination in Northern Paiute, locating it within an emerging typology of imperfective aspect from the formal semantics literature. Like the imperfective aspect in other languages, durative gemination has an event-i...

In Czech and in Russian there is a set of prefixes changing the meaning of imperfective verbs always in the same manner. The change often (in Czech always) demands adding a reflexive morpheme. This feature can be used for automatic recognition of words, without the need to store them in morphological dictionaries.

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...

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...