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...

Two experiments investigate the influence of verb aspect on situation representations. The results demonstrate that comprehenders use verb aspect as a cue to regulate the activation of ongoing simulations of situations over time. Experiment 1 measured word-by-word reading as well as sensibility judgements on sentences in which a target object word had been replaced by a picture. For the past im...

The unprefixed imperfective verbs of motion with present tense in -i (such as Russian vodit’, vozit’, bežat’), most of which are considered indeterminate in the modern languages, developed over a lengthy period from Proto-Indo-European to the disintegration of Proto-Slavic. The final period of their development in Slavic shows striking innovation in the formal and semantic structures, including...

This study investigates the L1 acquisition of the Korean imperfective aspect markers -ko issand -a iss-, and attempts to identify language-general and languagespecific acquisition patterns through comparison with Japanese. In cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of tense-aspect marking, children have been observed to associate progressive marking with activity verbs in early stages of d...

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 ...

This paper is intended to justify the classification of all the Russian prefixes into lexical and superlexical. It gives semantic and syntactic criteria for distinguishing between the two groups, including: the idiosyncratic or spatial lexical meaning versus operator-like function; the (in)ability to measure over objects and events; the (in)ability to stack; the (in)ability of a host verb to fo...

We used an off-line story continuation task and an online ERP reading task to investigate coreferential processing following sentences that portrayed transfer-of-possession events as either ongoing or completed, using imperfective and perfective verb aspect (e.g., Amanda was shifting/shifted some poker chips to Scott). The story continuation task demonstrated that people were more likely to beg...

Case in Lotha, (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken Wokha District of Nagaland) is marked by suffixes that appear to the right noun it marks. In Lotha ergative marker can combine with both nouns and pronouns, however, nominative markers only occur pronouns. has aspectual split ergativity which word class (noun vs. pronoun), aspect, tense are determining factors. The occurs mainly A argument a trans...

Arabic Subject Markers are interface phenomena (specifically between morphology and syntax). In this paper, I describe them briefly, I give my linguistic analysis within the framework of the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and I show how I implement them in the LKB system. I show that this system, despite its strength, does not allow for a proper implementation of these units. Standard Ara...