An important but under-appreciated aspect of grammar is the extent of the integration a grammatical construction specifies among its constitutive elements. Besides its vital role in synchronic grammar, this essential aspect of constructional meaning is a pivotal factor in grammaticization. These points will be illustrated through a variety of construction types drawn from a number of diverse la...

goal: this study aims at analyzing and categorizing different grammatical errors including morpho-syntactic and syntactic errors in written narratives of mentally retarded students in tehran. the frequencies of errors are compared among students in different grades. method: descriptive-analytic method has been used. a test consisted of four picture stories have been administered to 125 students...

Roumyana Slabakova University of Iowa This review article surveys recent research on the first and second language acquisition of temporal and aspectual properties of natural languages. Three recently published books are discussed in the context of the Aspect Hypothesis and the prototype, the connectionist, and the discourse explanations for the attested acquisition sequences. A potentially mis...

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...

Diana Santos § Abstract In the present paper, the concept of vagueness will be taken up in detail, in order to make it more precise and to pin down its relevance for translation. In addition to view (some) translation choices as contrastive vagueness, I will argue that grammar too has to be contrasted, introducing the concepts of grammatical vagueness and contrastive grammatical vagueness. The ...

In many languages, the same words are used to express epistemic and root modality. These modals further tend to interact with tense and aspect in systematic ways, based on their interpretation. Is this pattern accidental, or a consequence of grammar or meaning? I address this question by: (i) comparing ‘grammatical’ modals to verbs/adjectives that share meanings with modals, but not the same sc...

This study investigated the aspect first hypothesis which claims that children initially use verbal morphology to mark aspect and not tense. Experiment 1 tested 46 two- and three-year-old children's comprehension of tense as it is marked in the auxiliary system using a sentence-to-scene matching task. Children were presented with multiple performances of the same event and asked where a charact...

Verb aspect is a phenomenon of widespread occurrence and considerable variability in the world’s languages (see, e.g., Comrie, 1976; Dahl, 1985). In English its main manifestation consists of two grammatical oppositions, that between the simple and continuous forms of the verb, as in I eat vs I am eating, and that between the simple and perfect forms, as in I eat vs I have eaten. English allows...

Pronoun interpretation in English has been demonstrated to be sensitive to an interaction between grammatical and pragmatically-driven factors. This study investigated the interpretation of pronouns in Japanese, which has both null and overt forms. Thirty-two native speakers of Japanese participated in a passage completion experiment with transfer-of-possession contexts, varying prompt type, as...