This study investigated whether or not the temporal information encoded in aspectual morphemes can be used immediately by young children to facilitate event recognition during online sentence comprehension. We focused on the contrast between two grammatical aspectual morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, the perfective morpheme -le and the (imperfective) durative morpheme -zhe. The perfective morpheme...

Imperfectivity is cross-linguistically associated with the subinterval property and a modal component induced by the famous ‘imperfective paradox’. These properties arguably hold for both the progressive and habitual-iterative readings. However, both in Romance and Slavic, the imperfective may also refer to complete events instantiated in the world of evaluation: the so-called Imparfait narrati...

Machine translation between any two languages requires the generation of information that is implicit in the source language. In translating from Chinese to English, tense and other temporal information must be inferred from other grammatical and lexical cues. Moreover, Chinese multiple-clause sentences may contain inter-clausal relations (temporal or otherwise) that must be explicit in English...

This study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3 ; 5 to 8 ; 5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic forms (which have a segmentable perfective ...

This article reviews eight TAM (Tense/Aspect/Mood) markers of Turkish regarding their pragmatic functions. Its main argument is that three aspectuo-temporal situations and nominal predication present an environment where multiple compete for expression the choice marker depends on pragmatics. Perfective past viewpoint has four competing markers: mIştI, DI, mIş mIştIr. mIştI DI contrast in -mIşt...

The Chinese aspect marker le has long been considered very difficult for CSL learners. Therefore, we created an computer-based interactive multimedia CSL program of the perfective le based on the linguistic studies of the perfective le [3,25,26,28,29] and explored its effectiveness. Results of this study didn’t show that the multimedia program as a self-learning tool outperform the printed mate...

Bresnan (1994), based on data in English and Chicheŵa, proposes that the discourse function of locative inversion construction (LIC) is presentational focus, in which the referent of the NP ‘is introduced or reintroduced on the (part of the) scene referred to by the preposed locative’. Pan (1996) suggests that the discourse function of LIC in Chinese is the same. In this paper, I investigate tw...

Linguistic analyses of Mandarin Chinese and English have detailed the differences between the two languages in terms of the devices each makes available for expressing distinctions in the temporal contouring of events — verb aspect and Aktionsart. In this study, adult native speakers of each language were shown a cartoon, a movie, or a series of short action sequences and then videotaped talkin...