Understanding the temporal relations which hold between situations described in a narrative is a highly complex process. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the factors we have to take into account in order to determine the temporal coherence of a narrative discourse. In particular, aspectual information, tense, and world and context knowledge have to be considered and the interplay o...

The authors set three major goals for the book: to increase our understanding of the ‘relationship between lexical semantics and morphology in language acquisition’ (p. 8), to review and evaluate pertinent hypotheses ‘with respect to empirical evidence from crosslinguistic studies of English, Chinese, and Japanese, in both first and second language acquisition’ (p. 8), and to investigate ‘the l...

The CASK method (Computer-aided Acquisition of Semantic Knowledge) is being used at CELTA with the SEMANA (SEMantic ANAlyser) software, which was especially designed for this purpose. We use the notation of semantic feature structures as a meta-language for describing the category of aspect in Polish regardless of its pertaining to various levels of expression (morphological, syntactical or lex...

BACKGROUND Agrammatic speakers have problems with grammatical encoding and decoding. However, not all syntactic processes are equally problematic: present time reference, who questions, and reflexives can be processed by narrow syntax alone and are relatively spared compared to past time reference, which questions, and personal pronouns, respectively. The latter need additional access to discou...

In n n nt t t tr r r ro o o od d d du u u uc c c ct t t ti i i io o o on n n n The quantization properties of the Incremental Theme argument influence the quantization properties of complex verbal predicates. The basic principle that governs this interaction, which can be stated as in (1), was discussed in chapter 3: (1) aspectual composition : An episodic verb (in a sentence denoting a single ...

ing away from the intermediate levels in (28), focus on the edges of this scheme: from the diachronic perspective, the hypothesis that the original resultative meaning of present perfect in Old Russian transformed into the meaning of simple past is theoretically well founded and supported by the data. In modern Russian, there are no other past forms available than the ‘leftovers’ of what used t...

The interaction between syntactic structures and event structures has become an important area of linguistic research. The telic/atelic distinction, a property of an event having or not having a natural endpoint, is a focus in the discussion of this interaction. Together with durativity and dynamicity, telicity, a semantic notion, forms the base of the well-known Vendler (1967) four-way typolog...

In this paper, I argue both empirically and formally that we need an optional relative past in the semantics of the temporal system of Russian. I propose a temporal calculus which can effectively deal with relative past readings in Russian, including the interaction with temporal adverbials, without positing an unwelcome ambiguity of explicit markers of tense and aspect. Furthermore, I show tha...

A semantics for tense, modality, and aspect in natural language must capture causal and contingent relations between events and states as welt as merely temporal ones The paper investigates a non-reified dynamic logic based, formulation of the situation calculus is a formalism for a computational semantics for a. number of temporal categories in English and suggests that some recent claims that...

Perfectivity is often assumed to entail the completion of the event described by eventdenoting stems and their arguments. Although some scholars have noted that perfective markers do not always entail completion, their formal definitions contradict their informal descriptions. We show that these traditional models of perfective aspect cannot account for the aspectual system of Thai. In Thai, pe...