The paper deals with interpretative verbs as established by (Apresjan 2004) and interpretative converb constructions as established by (Boguslavskij 1977) and afterwards discussed in a cross-linguistic typological perspective in (Haspelmath & König 1995). It is shown that Apresjan’s approach offers a key to the semantics of converb (DEEPR) constructions. Special attention is paid to converb con...

The present study explores the production of bound morphemes in the speech of a nine-year old Greek child with moderate hearing impairment (HI). Data were obtained through the child’s responses to subtests from the Diagnostic Verbal IQ Test (DVIQ, Stavrakaki et al. 2000) and samples of her speech. The analysis concerned the inflection of nouns, adjectives and verbs. The results showed that, eve...

This paper will provide an account for the existence of pairs of deverbal nominals with –age and –ée giving rise to event readings. We first study the argument structure of the bases and of the derived nominals, and establish the general tendencies. We further examine the Aktionsart of the nominalizations and of the verbal bases. We conclude that these levels of investigation are not sufficient...

The Tongan suffix -‘i has been variously analyzed as a transitivizer, a passive suffix, a perfective suffix, and a modifier of verbal semantics. It has a variety of effects on the valency and aspect of the verb to which it is affixed. The One Form/One Meaning Principle (Johns 1992) suggests that these various effects should be linked together. I show that the apparently divergent functions of -...

This article aims at contrasting aspectual oppositions in English and Persian in the context of the novel The Old Man and the Sea, and its translation by Daryabandari (1983) as the data. Unlike English, in Persian perfective and imperfective forms are morphologically marked. While the vast majority of English simple past forms are translated into Persian by past perfective forms, only less than...

Temporal for-adverbials and in-adverbials are commonly used as a diagnostics for distinguishing between perfective and imperfective aspect, respectively. We observe that in Czech imperfective verbs may combine with in-adverbials as long as the resulting reading is a bounded ability reading. We argue, in line with van Geenhoven (2004); Zucchi and White (2001), that there is no intrinsic grammati...

Abstract The cross-linguistic variation in distribution and meaning of perfect constructions building on have + past participle Western European languages has been analysed terms the aoristic drift , shift from resultative via to perfective that takes us ‘classical’ like English ‘liberal’ French. This paper challenges (often implicit) assumption there is a single path along drift, resulting lin...

This paper revisits four clitics of Pagu (a West-Papuan language spoken in North Halmahera, Indonesia) those that have been described as Tense and Aspect markers (Wimbish 1991): -oka, -ou -osi, -uli. The first one is considered a tense marker for ‘non-future’ time, while the other three are aspect ‘perfective’, ‘imperfective’, ‘repetitive’ respectively. Following metatypy approach (Ross 2006; 2...

In the aspectual linguistic literature, a connection between imperfective aspect and modality/subjectivity is quite often mentioned. This article investigates a possible counterargument to this connection by analyzing modal readings of tenses in Russian. Two types of uses of tenses are described: (1) temporal reading of the tense with a modal inference and (2) strictly modal reading of the tens...