Two experiments investigate the influence of verb aspect on situation representations. The results demonstrate that comprehenders use verb aspect as a cue to regulate the activation of ongoing simulations of situations over time. Experiment 1 measured word-by-word reading as well as sensibility judgements on sentences in which a target object word had been replaced by a picture. For the past im...

This work investigates first-language (L1) influence on second-language (L2) acquisition of embedded aspect, comparing participants with homogeneous L1 background (Russian) in Greece (L2 Standard Modern Greek) and Cyprus (L2 Cypriot Greek), where verb complementation takes a finite form instead of an infinitival as in Russian. The focus of the experimental study is on those embedded sentential ...

The theoretical starting point of our considerations is Smith's theory of aspect (Smith 1991). We apply her theoretical framework to German { a language without any as-pectual markers { which is a language she does not investigate. In particular, we try to shed more light on the eeects aspect can have on discourse structure and show how English and German behave diierently in this respect. Smit...

Two experiments examine how grammatical verb aspect constrains our understanding of events. According to linguistic theory, an event described in the perfect aspect (John had opened the bottle) should evoke a mental representation of a finished event with focus on the resulting object, whereas an event described in the imperfective aspect (John was opening the bottle) should evoke a representat...

Two experiments investigate the influence of verb aspect on situation representations. The results demonstrate that comprehenders use verb aspect as a cue to regulate the activation of ongoing simulations of situations over time. Experiment 1 measured word-by-word reading as well as sensibility judgements on sentences in which a target object word had been replaced by a picture. For the past im...

This study investigates the L1 acquisition of the Korean imperfective aspect markers -ko issand -a iss-, and attempts to identify language-general and languagespecific acquisition patterns through comparison with Japanese. In cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of tense-aspect marking, children have been observed to associate progressive marking with activity verbs in early stages of d...

Imperfective or progressive verb morphology makes it possible to use the name of a whole event to refer to an activity that is clearly not a complete instance of that event, leading to what is known as the Imperfective Paradox. For example, a sentence like 'John was building a house' does not entail that a house ever got built. The Imperfective Paradox has received a number of different treatme...

This paper will provide an account for the existence of pairs of deverbal nominals with –age and –ée giving rise to event readings. We first study the argument structure of the bases and of the derived nominals, and establish the general tendencies. We further examine the Aktionsart of the nominalizations and of the verbal bases. We conclude that these levels of investigation are not sufficient...

In Slavic languages, verbal prefixes can be applied to perfective verbs deriving new perfective verbs, and multiple prefixes can occur in a single verb. This well-known type of data has not yet been adequately analyzed within current approaches to the semantics of Slavic verbal prefixes and aspect. The notion “aspect” covers “grammatical aspect”, or “viewpoint aspect” (see Smith 1991/1997), bes...