this study compares and contrasts tense and inherent aspect in english and persian lan-guage from a semantic and syntactic point of view. the aspectual verb system in both english and persian are semantically interpreted alike. however, in persian a group of stative verbs are grammaticalized by the imperfective obligatory morpheme mi-, while in english all sta-tive verbs perfective. furthermore...

(a) the modal auxiliaries ‘might’ and ‘must’, (b) the (sentential) adverbs ‘possibly’ and ‘probably’, (c) the various sentential operators that can be constructed from the modal adjectives ‘possible’ and ‘probable’, such as ‘it’s (very) possible that’, ‘it’s (very) probable that’, ‘there is a strong possibility that’, ‘is at least as probable as’, ‘is more probable than’, etc., and (d) those op...

mine the nature of mental computation. Over the last decade the focus of this debate has been the contrast between classical views of mental computation, seen as the rule-based manipulation of strings of symbols with a syntax, as opposed to more distributed systems, operating subsymbolically and without syntax. Despite the pervasive and crucial nature of this debate, it has nonetheless been har...

This paper discusses two possible formal approaches to the semantic/pragmatic particles of a subclass of the modal particles. It may well be that the approaches can be applied to other particles or that they can be applied to certain intonational patterns (e.g. contrastive stress), to morphemes (past tense, agreement) or to words (pronouns), constructions (some uses of definite descriptions, cl...

Adult language acquisition typically falls far short of nativelike competence. Various explanations have been proposed for this limited attainment of adults compared to children, including critical periods for language acquisition, sociocultural differences, motivational differences, and restricted input. This paper considers an alternative explanation in terms of the associative learning pheno...

The present research examined whether lexical (whole word) or more rule-based (morphological constituent) processes can be locally biased by experimental list context in past tense verb inflection. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults completed a past tense inflection task in which list context was manipulated across blocks containing regular past tense verbs (e.g. REACH-REACHED) or irregu...

Whether future morphemes in languages are temporal or modal operators is a central question in the semantics of the future. Most analyses (with the exception of [14]; see its rebuttal in [14]), agree that future morphemes do convey modality, and do not always make reference to future times. We study here the temporal (future time) reading of the future (John will arrive at 5pm), which we call ‘...