This study investigated the acquisition of grammatical aspect by Iranian EFL learners. The main question addressed in this study was whether Iranian EFL learners could distinguish conditions under which they must use either the perfective aspect  or imperfective aspect. A group of 110 adult, Persian-Speaking learners of English both at BA and MA levels Took a Michigan test based on which they w...

Imperfectivity is cross-linguistically associated with the subinterval property and a modal component induced by the famous ‘imperfective paradox’. These properties arguably hold for both the progressive and habitual-iterative readings. However, both in Romance and Slavic, the imperfective may also refer to complete events instantiated in the world of evaluation: the so-called Imparfait narrati...

Aspect contributes important temporal information for the construction of situation models in the human mind. Previous studies examining the effect of grammatical aspect on accomplishment verbs (e.g. bake a cake) show that perfective sentences/utterances are processed faster than imperfective ones (Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Chan et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2004, in press). The present study, however,...

this study compares and contrasts tense and inherent aspect in english and persian lan-guage from a semantic and syntactic point of view. the aspectual verb system in both english and persian are semantically interpreted alike. however, in persian a group of stative verbs are grammaticalized by the imperfective obligatory morpheme mi-, while in english all sta-tive verbs perfective. furthermore...

Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have shown that perfective sentences are often proce...

It is often assumed that French (like Greek) requires imperfective aspect as a counterfactual (CF) marker in the antecedent of PSCs (cf. e.g. [Iatridou, 2000]). This should explain why we find in the antecedent of PSCs the plus que parfait, combining imperfective morphology with a layer of perfect, cf. (1). Tenses without imperfective morphology, i.a. the passé composé (that has both simple pas...

Temporal for-adverbials and in-adverbials are commonly used as a diagnostics for distinguishing between perfective and imperfective aspect, respectively. We observe that in Czech imperfective verbs may combine with in-adverbials as long as the resulting reading is a bounded ability reading. We argue, in line with van Geenhoven (2004); Zucchi and White (2001), that there is no intrinsic grammati...

We investigated the relative contribution of perfective and imperfective aspectual cues on situation models. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to choose pictures showing completed events than pictures showing ongoing events when they had read perfective sentences, but chose either picture after reading imperfective sentences. In Experiment 2, only one picture was presented and part...

The hallmark property of the Russian verbal system is taken to be the bipartite perfective/imperfective distinction in the domain of grammatical aspect. In this paper we show that there is a substantial and productive class of morphologically complex verbs that do not clearly pattern as either perfective or imperfective on standard formal (distributional) tests for perfectivity versus imperfect...

This comprehension study on aspectual form-to-meaning correspondences set out to see if the presence of aspect as morphological category in a language makes the acquisition of aspectual form-meaning pairs relatively easy in comparison to a language that lacks such an aspect category. In Polish, aspect is a grammatical category—all verbs are marked as perfective or imperfective—and tense is mark...