In this paper, I will discuss an irrealis-construction in Russian, which poses non-trivial problems for a compositional analysis of tense, aspect and mood (the categories subsumed under the abbreviation TAM). The past tense morphology on the verb – in absence of a semantic PAST operator – is argued to be licensed by an IRREALIS operator. This concord phenomenon will be accounted for in terms ag...

This paper focuses on a theory of tense and aspect the representation of time in natural language that attempts a formal representation of the relevant lin guistic devices as implication rules in rst order logic It presents a rich ontology as far as verb aspect is concerned distinguishing between complex patterns and vagueness Examples and conclusions are drawn from the com parison between Engl...

This paper takes a closer look at the attraction properties of T. It highlights an empirically attested distinction between rich agreement inflection, exhibited by null-subject languages, and rich tense inflection, found in Romance, but not Germanic, and argues for the syntactic relevance of this distinction. We propose a novel typology of the ways in which T's featural requirements can be sati...

Abstract Temporal/aspectual morphology often serves as a diagnostic for actional classes. Bantu languages are known their highly developed tense, aspect (and mood) systems. The East Ruvu of Tanzania unusual in that they exhibit decidedly reduced set temporal/aspectual morphemes. This paper contributes to the growing body research on actionality showing despite not being encoded overtly, perfect...

This thesis introduces a special form of pseudopassive that differs from previously discussed forms in that it includes a direct object adjacent to the verb. It is shown that the direct object position in this construction is restricted to NPs that lack D(eterminer)-level projections. As a result, the direct object can only receive a non-specific interpretation, resists certain types of modific...

This talk discusses integrative motivation from the perspective of the socio-educational model of second language acquisition, and will focus on six topics. The first concerns the concept of motivation which can be shown to comprise at least 10 cognitive, affective and conative components. The second topic is the socio-educational model of second language acquisition. It is presented in two for...

The correct translation of verb tenses ensures that the temporal ordering of events in the source text is maintained in the target text. This paper assesses the utility of automatically labeling English Simple Past verbs with a binary discursive feature, narrative vs. non-narrative, for statistical machine translation (SMT) into French. The narrativity feature, which helps deciding which of the...

We present a speeded production study of the English past tense that is designed to evaluate between conflicting theories of the mechanism of verb inflection. Test items are verbs that systematically differ in regularity but also in overall ease of processing as defined by a number of statistical and distributional factors. We show that overall ease, but not regularity, predicts differences in ...