A widely adopted classification of aspectual type is that based on Vendler’s (1967) four-way aspectual classification of verbs into accomplishments, achievements, activities and statives. Moreover, some have assumed, either explicitly or implicitly, that this aspectual classification is universal (see, for instance, Borer 2005, Krifka 1992, Filip 1999). That is, each language has predicates tha...

One of the goals of syntax is to determine how much languages do vary, in the hope to be able to make hypothesis about how much natural languages can vary. The syntax of aspect is a fertile ground for comparing approaches to variation in the interface between syntax and semantics. Cinque (1999) is a leading example of a research program that attempts to show that at a particular level of repres...

Earlier research shows that mothers and children often provide a justification when opposing their partner's intentions, statements or actions. The analysis of 32 hours of videorecording of natural interaction from 4 dyads at 2 time periods (20-22 and 24-27 months) and 18 hours from 18 children interacting with their familiar partners, 6 at 2, 4 and 6 years of age, shows that middle-class mothe...

The modern American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s craftsmanship is fully shown in the keen, delicate observation, ingenious musicality, pure and accurate poetic diction, rich and vivid images in her poems. Filling Station is a poem depicting a decayed family-run station, unified by the pervasive presence of oil, and complete with filth and beauty, disorder and order, hope and decay, masculine and fem...

Vowel quality perception in quantity languages is considered to be unrelated to vowel duration since duration is used to realize quantity oppositions. To test the role of microdurational variations in vowel category perception in Estonian listening experiments with synthetic stimuli were carried out, involving five vowel pairs along the close-open axis. The results show that in the case of high...

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...

The paper presents a parallel between two important theories for the treatment of information which address questions that are apparently unrelated and that are studied by different research communities: an enriched view of formal concept analysis and abstract argumentation. Both theories exploit a binary relation (expressing object-property links, attacks between arguments). We show that when ...

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...

This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coercion. We define aspectual coercion as a combinatorial semantic operation requiring computation over and above that provided by combining lexical items through expected syntactic processes. An experiment is described assessing whether or not parsing of a string requiring coercion--in addition to syntactic composition--is m...