Finite Verb Morphology in the Romance Languages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Esher ◽  
Franck Floricic ◽  
Martin Maiden
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
The Right ◽  
Morphological Expression ◽  
Finite Verb

The term finite morphology corresponds to the morphological expression of person and number and of tense, mood, and aspect in the verb. In Romance languages, these features are typically expressed “synthetically,” that is, in single word forms. These latter generally comprise a ‘root’, usually leftmost in the word, which conveys the lexical meaning of the verb, and material to the right of the root which conveys most of the grammatical meaning. But lexical and grammatical information is also characteristically ‘compressed’, or ‘conflated’ within the word, in that it can be impossible to tease apart exponents of the grammatical meanings or to extricate the expression of lexical meaning from that of grammatical meaning. The range of grammatical meanings encoded in Romance finite verb forms can vary considerably cross-linguistically. At the extremes, there are languages that have three tenses of the subjunctive, and others that have no synthetic future-tense form, and others that have two future-tense forms or no (synthetic) past-tense forms. There can also be extreme mismatches between meanings and the forms that express them: again, at the extremes, meanings may be present without formal expression, or forms may appear which correspond to no coherent meaning. Both for desinences and for patterns of root allomorphy, variation is observed with respect to the features expressed and their morphological exponence. While some categories of Latin finite synthetic verb morphology have been entirely lost, many forms are continued, with or without functional continuity. An innovation of many Romance varieties is the emergence of a new synthetic future and conditional from a periphrasis originally expressing deontic modality.

Preverbation and narrativity in Lithuanian. The distribution of finite simplex and compound verbs in narrative main clauses

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Text ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Compound Verbs ◽  
Finite Verb

The article deals with the use of simplex and compound (prefixed) verbs in narrative text. Main clauses comprising finite verb forms in the past and in the past habitual tense are examined in an attempt to establish to what extent simplex and compound verbs exhibit aspect oppositions, and whether a correlation exists between the occurrence of simplex vs. compound verbs and distinct textual units. The investigation shows that although simple and compound verbs in Lithuanian are not in direct aspect opposition to each other, in the background text portions most of the verbs are prefixless past tense forms or habitual forms, whereas in the plot-advancing text portions, the vast majority of verbs are compound verbs in the simple past tense.  

scholarly journals “The Trout Breaks the Ice” by Mikhail Kuzmin: Verse and Grammar

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Marina Akimova
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Complex Composition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Compositional Structure ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Astronomical Time ◽  
Mikhail Kuzmin ◽  
Iambic Pentameter ◽  
Finite Verb

The author explores various compositional levels of the Russian modernist author Mikhail Kuzmin’s long poem “The Trout Breaks the Ice”. The levels are: (1) the grammatical tenses vs. the astronomical time (non-finite verb forms (imperative) are also assumed to indicate time); (2) the meters of this polymetric poem; (3) realistic vs. symbolic and (4) static vs. dynamic narrative modes. The analysis is done by the chapter, and the data are summarized in five tables. It turned out that certain features regularly co-occur, thus supporting the complex composition of the poem. In particular, the present tense and time regularly mark the realistic and static chapters written in various meters, whereas the past tense and time are specific to the realistic and dynamic chapters written in iambic pentameter. The article sheds new light on the compositional structure of Kuzmin’s poem and the general principles of poetic composition.

scholarly journals On correlation between the emergence of finite verbs and the development of utterances in Russian and German

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
Natalia Vladimirovna Gagarina ◽  
Dagmar Bittner
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Order ◽  
Strongly Correlated ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Verb Inflection ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
German Child ◽  
Finite Verb

The study examines the hypotheses that the acquisition of the finite verb is an indispensable and linking constituent of the development of SVO utterances. Four apparently separate or at least separable processes are analysed over 6 months in one Russian and one German child: a) the emergence of verbs in the child’s utterances, b) the occurrence of correctly inflected (finite) verb forms, c) the development of multi-component utterances containing a verb, and c) the emergence of (potential) subjects and objects. Russian and German exhibit rich verb morphology, and in both languages finiteness is strongly correlated with inflectional categories like person, number and tense. With both children we find a correlation in the temporal order of these four processes and – what is more relevant for our study – a dependency of a certain development on the utterance level on the emergence of finite verbs. Further, our investigation shows that language-specific development comes in to play already when children start to acquire verb inflection and becomes more contrastive when we observe the onset of the production of the SVO utterances.  

The perfective past tense in Greek as a second language

2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Clahsen ◽  
Maria Martzoukou ◽  
Stavroula Stavrakaki
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
L2 Proficiency ◽  
Advanced Level ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Word Forms

This study reports results from four experiments investigating the perfective past tense of Greek in adult second language (L2) learners. The data come from L2 learners of Greek with intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency and different native language (L1) backgrounds, and L1 speakers of Greek. All participants were tested in both oral and written elicited production and acceptability judgment tasks on both existing and novel verb stimuli. The results showed that the L2 learners did not achieve native-like performance on the perfective past tense in Greek, even at an advanced level of proficiency. The L2 learners often chose verb forms that did not encode the perfective past tense. Differences to native speakers were found particularly for non-sigmatic verb forms, which contain morphological irregularities in the target language. The results of the four experiments will be discussed in the light of previous findings and accounts of inflectional morphology in adult L2 learners. Taken together, the results suggest that L2 learners rely more on stored inflected word forms and on associative generalizations than native speakers.

scholarly journals THE USE OF PRESENT PERFECT IN THE EXPRESSION OF PAST TEMPORALITY IN L2 SPANISH AND CATALAN BY CHILDREN OF MOROCCAN ORIGIN

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
Eulàlia Canals
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Functional Feature ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
Story Retell ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Right

This study examines the acquisition of Catalan and Spanish past-tense verbs (Preterite, Present Perfect, and Imperfect) by children of Moroccan origin in three schools in the Barcelona metropo1itan area. It presents data that allow us to study which of the three tenses poses the most problems for the second language (L2) speakers as compared to the native speakers in a control group. The data were obtained using elicited story-retell tasks and oral narratives. The results show that in both languages acquiring the accurate functional use of verbs is more difficult than making the right lexical or morphological choices. The greatest functional difficulty lies in the acquisition of the Preterite vis-à-vis the Present Perfect. These results provide additional evidence that form precedes function. However, they challenge an established position on the acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages, which holds that the most difficult functional feature to acquire for L2 learners of these languages is the difference between perfective and imperfective tenses.

Morphomic patterns, suppletion, and the Romance morphological landscape

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Maiden
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
History Of

This chapter uses especially cases of suppletion in the history of Romance languages to illustrate the role of morphomic patterns in diachrony. It also places Romance verb morphology in the wider context of Romance inflexional morphology, including those of the noun and of the adjective. It observes that suppletion practically never assumes anything but a morphomic distribution and is practically limited to the verb. Comparison is made with some Italo-Romance and Daco-Romance varieties where suppletion is indeed (occasionally) found in the noun and adjective (and is usually not morphomic). The evidence suggests that speakers, faced with different ways of expressing identical lexical meaning, exploit whatever patterns of root allomorphy happen to be already available in the language. In the Romance verb these are only morphomic; in the noun and adjective such patterns are scarcely found at all, but where they are they tend to be aligned with number.

scholarly journals use of aspect in Czech L2

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 177-194
Author(s):  
Barbara Schmiedtová
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
English Learner ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Imperfective Aspect ◽  
Verbal Prefixes ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Right

The focus of the present paper is on the difference between English and German learners‘ use of perfectivity and imperfectivity. The latter is expressed by means of suffixation (suffix -va-). In contrast, perfectivity is encoded either by suffixation (-nou-) or by prefixation (twenty different prefixes that mostly modify not only aspectual but also lexical properties of the verb). In the native Czech data set, there is no significant difference between the number of imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms. In the English data, imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms are equally represented as well. However, German learners use significantly more perfective forms than English learners and Czech natives. When encoding perfectivity in Czech, German learners prefer to use prefixes to suffixes. Overall, English learners in comparison to German learners encode more perfectives by means of suffixation than prefixation. These results suggest that German learners of Czech focus on prefixes expressing aspectual and lexical modification of the verb, while English learners rather pay attention to the aspectual opposition between perfective and imperfective. In a more abstract way, the German learner group focuses on the operations carried out on the left side from the verb stem while the English learner group concentrates on the operations performed on the right side qfrom the verb stem. This sensitivity can be to certain degree motivated by the linguistic devices of the corresponding source languages: English learners of Czech use imperfectives mainly because English has marked fully grammatical form for the expression of imperfective aspect – the progressive -ing form. German learners, on the other hand, pay in Czech more attention to the prefixes, which like in German modify the lexical meaning of the verb. In this manner, Czech prefixes used for perfectivization function similar to the German verbal prefixes (such as ab-, ver-) modifying Aktionsart.  

scholarly journals Delineating Turkic non-finite verb forms by syntactic function

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Jonathan North Washington ◽  
Francis Morton Tyers
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Verbal Noun ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Turkic Languages ◽  
Syntactic Function ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Finite Verb

In this paper, we argue against the primary categories of non-finite verb used in the Turkology literature: “participle” (причастие ‹pričastije›) and “converb” (деепричастие ‹dejepričastije›). We argue that both of these terms conflate several discrete phenomena, and that they furthermore are not coherent as umbrella terms for these phenomena. Based on detailed study of the non-finite verb morphology and syntax of a wide range of Turkic languages (presented here are Turkish, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Tuvan, and Sakha), we instead propose delineation of these categories according to their morphological and syntactic properties. Specifically, we propose that more accurate categories are verbal noun, verbal adjective, verbal adverb, and infinitive. This approach has far-reaching implications to the study of syntactic phenomena in Turkic languages, including phenomena ranging from relative clauses to clause chaining.

Hebrew verbal passives in Later Language Development: the interface of register and verb morphology

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 1309-1336 ◽  
Author(s):  
DORIT RAVID ◽  
LIZZY VERED
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Active Voice ◽  
Verb Tense

AbstractThe current study examined the production of Hebrew verbal passives across adolescence as mediated by linguistic register and verb morphology. Participants aged eight to sixteen years and a group of adults were asked to change written active-voice sentences into corresponding passive-voice forms, divided by verb register (neutral and high),binyanpattern (Qal / Nif'al, Hif'il / Huf'al, andPi'el / Pu'al), and verb tense (past and future tense). Results showed that Hebrew passive morphology is a very late acquisition, almost a decade later than in other languages, that passivizing neutral-register verbs was less challenging than high-register verbs, and that past tense verbs were easier to passivize than future tense verbs. An order of acquisition was determined among the threebinyanpairs. The paper provides an account of these findings grounded in the event-telling role of Hebrew passives in discourse and the spurt of abstract, lexically specific vocabulary in Later Language Development.

scholarly journals TEMPORALITAS PADA VERBA DALAM BAHASA DANI BARAT

LITERA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Supardi Supardi
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
The Future ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Plural Subject ◽  
Plural Subjects ◽  
Remote Past

This study aims to describe the temporality aspect of verbs in the Western Dani Language (WDL) in Papua. The data were from Morfologi Bahasa Dani Barat, a researchreport by Purba, et al. (1994). The temporality was proved by the distributional methodsupplemented by permutation and deletion techniques. The findings show that WDLhas nine verb forms. Those are ones with: 1) a singular subject for the present tense, 2) asingular subject for the recent past tense, 3) a singular subject for the remote past tense, 4)a singular subject for the future tense, 5) a plural subject for the present tense, 6) a pluralsubject for the recent past tense, 7) a plural subject for the remote past tense, 8) a pluralsubject for the future tense, and 9) the habitual present tense. Temporality verb forms areclassified into two groups: eight verbs based on the time an event occurs and one verb ofa habitual event. The nine verbs showing time are distinguished on the basis of singularand plural subjects.

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