Aspectual composition occurs when grammatical aspect (perfective and imperfective) and eventuality types (accomplishments, achievements, processes, states) carried by the verb phrase combine to trigger particular meanings. This aspectual composition may change the denotation of the eventuality type resulting to aspectual shifts An instance of this phenomenon is found in Modern Greek, where ther...

While most studies of generalised verbal –s report the effects of the Northern Subject Rule (subject type and adjacency between the subject and the verb condition verbal –s), work on this feature in Vernacular Newfoundland English (VNE) report a lack of NSR effects. Instead, verbal –s in VNE is associated with habitual aspect and verb stativity. This paper integrates generative and variationist...

In the Alabama language an imperfective aspect can be formed by geminating the onset consonant or lengthening the vowel of the penultimate syllable of a word. The imperfective morpheme consists of a single mora (with a linked high tone), and I demonstrate that whether gemination or lengthening takes place follows directly from a ranking of relevant constraints. The current optimality analysis d...

The main goal of this study is to prove that two modal mechanisms Greenberg (2003) postulated for English indefinite singular (IS) and bare plural (BP) generics in the nominal domain are mirrored in Polish perfective and imperfective generics in the event domain. On the basis of Oosterhof’s (2006) argumentation, I justify the distinction between the GEN and the HAB intensional operators. With t...

This paper provides two puzzles for a theory of aspect. The first concerns the quirky behavior of the Russian imperfective with regard to its culmination properties: it seems to function like the perfect aspect in certain cases, but like the progressive in others. The other puzzle concerns how the Russian imperfective constrains the temporal location of a described event: it relates distinct ev...

Abstract This paper addresses the relationship between habituals, including expressions of unbounded repetition, and verbal aspect. It is often assumed that past events are conceptualized as habitually occurring or repeated in an way inherently expressed by imperfective verb forms languages with A crosslinguistic analysis provided habituals perfective aspect, based on 36 from different language...

This dissertation is about the structure of temporal semantics and children’s acquisition of temporal language. It argues for the importance of investigating semantics both at the abstract level of linguistic structures and at the concrete level of the time-course of acquisition, as these two levels provide natural constraints for each other. With respect to semantics, it provides a computation...