This paper promotes the hypothesis that central grammatical categories must be analysed as pragmatic rather than semantic entities, in order to explain their seemingly redundant typological distribution. A case is made of the relatively complex English past tense system versus the single Russian past tense, and it is shown how the distinctions within the former system can be analysed in terms o...

1. RECAPITULATION Part I of this article treats tense in relative clauses (RCs) in English, Russian and Japanese. The temporal centre in RCs can always be Tproi, and sometimes it has to be Tproi. 1. In SOT languages such as English, the Tense in the RC is bound in RC\wollconfigurations, i.e., we find a Tproi bound by woll. The licensing of the morphological tense in the RC is non-local in these...

The traditional account of the acquisition of English verb morphology supposes that a dual architecture underlies the transition from early rote-learning processes (in which past tense forms of verbs are correctly produced) to the systematic treatment of verbs (in which irregular verbs are prone to error). A connectionist account supposes that this transition can occur in a single mechanism (in...

this study compares and contrasts tense and inherent aspect in english and persian lan-guage from a semantic and syntactic point of view. the aspectual verb system in both english and persian are semantically interpreted alike. however, in persian a group of stative verbs are grammaticalized by the imperfective obligatory morpheme mi-, while in english all sta-tive verbs perfective. furthermore...

A central issue in cognitive neuroscience is whether the left perisylvian language system is organised as a single undifferentiated process, or whether it responds preferentially to different types of linguistic input (Marslen-Wilson, & Tyler, 1997; Ullman et al., 1997). The distinction between the regular and irregular English past tense has played a central role in this debate because of the ...

How do we produce the past tenses of verbs? For the last 20 years this question has been the focal domain for conflicting theories of language, knowledge representation, and cognitive processing. On one side of the debate have been similarity-based or single-route approaches that propose that all past tenses are formed simply through phonological analogies to existing past tenses stored in memo...

Children's productions of the affix -ed in past tense and past participle contexts (e.g., the boy kicked the ball vs. the ball was kicked) were examined in spontaneous conversations and elicited productions. The performances of 7 children with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared with those of 2 control groups of typically developing children (age matches, MLU matches). Children wit...

Many languages allow for ”fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou [2000] has coined this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional construction. This paper proposes to explain Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind...