Natural language expressions are generally underspecified and need specification of different kinds to get a contextually relevant interpretation. One instance of underspecification is the imperfective aspect in Russian, which gives rise to a considerable variety of readings. This poses certain problems for an account in purley semantic terms: What is the common denominator of all these interpr...

Mandarin Chinese as an aspect language (Norman, 1988:163) has a rich inventory of aspect markers, including perfective -le, -guo and imperfective -zhe, zai. Of these -le is the most studied marker because of its mysterious behaviors. For example, is it necessary to differentiate between the perfective -le and the COS le? Does -le indicate completion or termination? Are there any constraints on ...

By analyzing corpus data, we have shown that the tendencies of restricting perfective past marking to Accomplishments and Achievements and imperfective marking to Statives and Activities as described by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai, 1991; Andersen & Shirai, 1996), undesirable in the acquisition of various languages, are desirable in the acquisition of a language like Chinese, because these ten...

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...

An aspectual comprehension experiment with Dutch learners reveals an asymmetry in their understanding of the Present Perfect on the one hand versus the Imperfective Past and Periphrastic Past Progressive on the other. Dutch 2 and 3-year-olds have acquired the completion entailment of the Perfect, but do not properly restrict their interpretation of the Imperfective Past and Periphrastic Past Pr...

The ambiguity of KO ISS has been much discussed in the literature (see, e.g., works cited above). But it is yet to receive a satisfactory treatment on both empirical and theoretical grounds. It poses a challenge to Lee (2008), for instance: Lee claims that the imperfective marker always selects for a VP that takes an actor subject. As illustrated by (3), however, it is compatible with a sentenc...

In this paper, I will discuss an irrealis-construction in Russian, which poses non-trivial problems for a compositional analysis of tense, aspect and mood (the categories subsumed under the abbreviation TAM). The past tense morphology on the verb – in absence of a semantic PAST operator – is argued to be licensed by an IRREALIS operator. This concord phenomenon will be accounted for in terms ag...

One main problem for NLP applications is that natural language expressions are underspecified and require enrichments of different sorts to get a truthconditional interpretaton in context. Underspecification applies on two levels: what is said underdetermines what is meant, and linguistic meaning underspecifies what is said. One instance of this phenomenon is aspect in Russian, especially the i...

In Section 2, we review (briefly and superficially) some of the basics of NP interpretations, the semantics of the relevant operator-like elements, and their interaction. Then we look at how some natural languages encode certain relations between NPs and certain operators, giving us a window on some aspects of the “logic of natural language”. There we find a puzzle in the Russian “genitive of n...

Based on the definition of “tense” and “aspect”, this review paper intends to compare analyze similarities differences between Arabic English tense aspect categories in terms their forms, functions usage. Moreover, current paper, I propose comparison analysis that account for English. The are based qualitative method which depends solely recent previous research works. In addition, assume there...