This course sets out with an examination of the role of events in accounting for inferential properties of modification. It presents a model of the logic of modification following the neo-Davidsonian mode of composition but reworking the Davidsonian framework. The approach is shown to accord with more intuitively appealing notions of event individuation and to afford a uniform treatment of indi...

Slavic languages have a rich inventory of verb affixes that typically have syntactic and semantic effects on the argument structure of the derived verb. Although verb affixes function as operators on verbs, they often restrict the interpretation of certain nominal arguments in a way in which determiners in a nominal construction do. This intriguing fact has not been systematically described in ...

ing away from the intermediate levels in (28), focus on the edges of this scheme: from the diachronic perspective, the hypothesis that the original resultative meaning of present perfect in Old Russian transformed into the meaning of simple past is theoretically well founded and supported by the data. In modern Russian, there are no other past forms available than the ‘leftovers’ of what used t...

In a story completion study involving transfer-of-possession passages (John handed a book to Bob. He _____), Stevenson et al. (1994) identified a pronoun interpretation preference that is compatible with two possible explanations: a superficial thematic role bias for Goals over Sources, and a deeper event structure bias toward focusing on the end state of such events. To distinguish these hypot...

Abstract The focus of the present study is relation between metaphor and aspect: are certain grammatical forms more prone to be used metaphorically? We approach this issue through a puzzling case Russian aspectual triplets. based on distributions unprefixed imperfective verb gruzit’ (IPFV1) ‘load’, its perfective counterparts (PFVs) prefixed secondary imperfectives (IPFV2s) with prefixes na- , ...

This paper reports on a literary corpus study of four grammatical tenses across European languages. The consists selection eight chapters from Javier Marías’s Spanish novel Así empieza lo malo ‘Thus bad begins’, and its translations to English, Dutch, French. We annotated 1579 verb forms in the source text for tense, and, subsequently, their other languages, distinguishing between two registers...

This paper argues that the distribution of the two Chinese aspectual auxiliaries -Ie and -zhe in the locative inversion construction is determined by the semantics of the event, in particular the interaction of lexical aspect (telicity and stativity) and agentivity. The -le/-zhe alternation shows a gradient effect similar to the selection of perfective auxiliaries in Romance and Germanic (Sorac...

Two major mechanisms of encoding telicity across languages are either marking the object as exhaustively countable or measurable, or utilizing a specific prefix on the verbal form. English predominantly uses the first mechanism, while Russian mostly utilizes the second. The learning task of an English speaker acquiring Russian, then, is two-fold: to learn each individual verb with its subset of...

In (3a), the verb root -baalbecomes baadwhen it is followed by causative -is-, applicative -ilor perfective -idi. As seen in (3b) the prefective in realized [idi] when the preceding vowel is /i/, /u/ or /a/. In (3c), however, when the preceding vowel is /e/ or /o/, there is a vowel height harmony and the perfective suffix is realized -ele. In response to this perfect complementarity, a single u...

German and French football language display tense-aspect-mood (TAM) forms which differ from the TAM use in other genres. In talk, present indicative may replace pluperfect subjunctive. reports of matches, imperfective past occur instead a perfective tense-aspect form. We argue that two phenomena share functional core are licensed same way, is direct result genre they in. More precisely, match a...