It is well-known that in many languages copular verbs are not needed with nonverbal predicates when the clause is in present tense, but are needed in other tenses. Hebrew (Rapoport 1987), Arabic (Benmamoun 2000), Russian, and Turkish (Wetzer 1996: 52, Stassen 1997: 46, Baker 2003) are relatively familiar languages that fit this profile. A less familiar example is Sakha (also known as Yakut), a ...

This paper investigates an inference (which we call cessation) that no state of the kind described currently holds. We propose that this inference occurs in a sentence φ when: (a) φ has stative verb in the past tense and (b) there is a present tense alternative to φ that shares a common reference time concept and is not vacuously false. We show how (a) and (b) correlate with the availability of...

This study reexamines the semantics of the Portuguese Present Perfect and proposes ananalysis of this periphrastic past that does not appeal to type-shifting coercionmechanisms. Aspectual coercion was claimed to explain purported mismatches betweenselection restrictions of the Portuguese Present tense and the aspectual properties of thePerfect (Schmitt 2001). The present stu...

ii Acknowledgements iii List of Abbreviations iv Section 1: Introduction 1 Section 2: The Spanish Present Subjunctive 3 2.1. Concordantia Temporum 3 2.2. The Present Subjunctive in Argentinean Spanish 5 2.3. Previous Accounts of Violations of Concordantia Temporum 7 Section 3: Time and Language 14 3.1. Tensed and Tenseless Languages 14 3.2. Reichenbach‟s Theory of Tense 18 3.3. Hornstein‟s Neo-...

The Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM) predicts that English-speaking children will show similar patterns of provision across different tense-marking morphemes (Rice, Wexler & Hershberger, 1998). The aim of the present study was to test this prediction by examining provision rates for third person singular present tense and first and third person singular forms of copula BE and auxiliary BE ...

BACKGROUND Recent literature documented the presence of spatial-temporal interactions in the human brain. The aim of the present study was to verify whether representation of past and future is also mapped onto spatial representations and whether the cerebellum may be a neural substrate for linking space and time in the linguistic domain. We asked whether processing of the tense of a verb is in...

This study diagnoses the challenges of foreign language learners in using present perfect tense when writing English. Most fail to correctly write sentences and substitute it with past tense. The researchers suggest an instructional program based on steps for teachers solve problem sample is twenty students seventh grade one government schools girls. asked participants After analysing students'...

Polysemy is a major characteristic of natural languages. Like words, syntactic forms can have several meanings. Understanding the correct meaning of a syntactic form is of great importance to many NLP applications. In this paper we address an important type of syntactic polysemy – the multiple possible senses of tense syntactic forms. We make our discussion concrete by introducing the task of T...