We investigated the relative contribution of perfective and imperfective aspectual cues on situation models. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to choose pictures showing completed events than pictures showing ongoing events when they had read perfective sentences, but chose either picture after reading imperfective sentences. In Experiment 2, only one picture was presented and part...

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...

In Slavic languages, verbal prefixes can be applied to perfective verbs deriving new perfective verbs, and multiple prefixes can occur in a single verb. This well-known type of data has not yet been adequately analyzed within current approaches to the semantics of Slavic verbal prefixes and aspect. The notion “aspect” covers “grammatical aspect”, or “viewpoint aspect” (see Smith 1991/1997), bes...

The grammaticalization literature notes the cross-linguistic robustness of a diachronic pattern involving the aspectual categories resultative, perfect, and perfective. Resultative aspect markers often develop into perfect markers, which then end up as perfect plus perfective markers. We introduce supporting data from the history of Old and Middle Indo-Aryan languages, whose instantiation of th...

The grammaticalization literature notes the cross-linguistic robustness of a diachronic pattern involving the aspectual categories resultative, perfect, and perfective. Resultative aspect markers often develop into perfect markers, which then end up as perfect plus perfective markers. We introduce supporting data from the history of Old and Middle Indo-Aryan languages, whose instantiation of th...

The hallmark property of the Russian verbal system is taken to be the bipartite perfective/imperfective distinction in the domain of grammatical aspect. In this paper we show that there is a substantial and productive class of morphologically complex verbs that do not clearly pattern as either perfective or imperfective on standard formal (distributional) tests for perfectivity versus imperfect...

While most Mayan languages show an ergative-absolutive pattern of agreement in all main clauses, Chol shows what has been described as an aspect-based split (Quizar and Knowles-Berry 1988; Vázquez Álvarez 2002; Law et al. 2006): perfective clauses show an ergative-absolutive pattern, as in (1), while non-perfective clauses show what appears to be a nominative-accusative pattern, illustrated in ...

The aim of this study is to investigate the interaction between viewpoint aspect and argument realization. More specifically, we examine the correlation of +/ perfective verb forms in Greek and null objects with indefinite, non-specific interpretation. It is argued that although null objects are possible with both perfective and imperfective verbs, imperfective verbs favour object omission more...