ASPECT AND AKTIONSART OF SECONDARY ASPECTUAL VERBS IN SERBIAN

The aim of the paper is to investigate aspectual value of secondary aspectual verb phrase in Serbian in terms of both grammatical and lexical aspect (Aktionsart). The present analysis focuses on two secondary aspectualizers krenuti and stati, which when used as lexical verbs have the opposite meanings related to motion in space, but when they appear as phase construction heads both verbs modify the opening segment of the aspectual event. The central idea of the proposal is that event types in general largely depend on temporal structures which need to be contextualized before they are formally identifiable. In other words, contrary to traditional approaches which define lexical aspect as inherent to verb meaning, we claim that each verb form (or any lexical and/or grammatical form for that matter) has an underlying meaning through which it entertains systematic relations with other forms in a language (Hirtle 1982:40). We start form aspectual and Aktionsart features of krenuti and stati as verb lexemes, then move onto the level of syntax to identify the co-compositional aspect of the overall phase construction via event structure and event segmentation mechanisms. Finally, the present paper aims to examine different uses of the two secondary aspectual verbs, along with the different types of events they can denote in order to bring to light the potential meanings which give rise to the various contextual senses of the aspectual construction. The reported results of the analysis were checked on the Corpus of Contemporary Serbian Language (SrpKor 2013). Key words: aspectual constructions, Aktionsart, aspectual event, temporal structure, secondary aspectualizer, event segmentation, event co-composition

EVENT-CANCELLING SEMANTICS OF THE ENGLISH ASPECTUALIZER START AND ITS SERBIAN EQUIVALENT KRENUTI

The paper revisits the issue of semantic equivalency of two aspectual verbs, start and krenuti, which is proposed by xxx (2021a, 2021b). The present analysis focuses on the causative and dynamic semantic features of start and krenuti, with the aim of a contrastive analysis of the aspectual constructions headed by these two verbs. It is shown that both start and krenuti, provided that the necessary linguistic conditions are met, have the ability to “cancel” the event initiated via constructional phase modification. The conditions for such event-cancelling result from the lexical semantics of start and krenuti, as well as from the semantic co-composition on the level of the aspectual construction as a whole. The theoretical frame of the analysis is the presupposition and consequence account by A. Freed (1979). The contrastive analysis and presented theoretical conclusions are backed by a parallel corpus of 200 English and Serbian sentences compiled from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GlowBE 2013) and the Corpus of Contemporary Serbian Language (SrpKor 2013). Key words: aspectualizers, aspectual constructions, aspectual event, temporal structure, presupposition and consequence, event-cancelling

Processing of Complement Coercion With Aspectual Verbs in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence From a Self-Paced Reading Study

This study examines whether Chinese complement coercion sentences with aspectual verbs will elicit processing difficulty during real-time comprehension. Complement coercion is a linguistic phenomenon in which certain verbs (e.g., start, enjoy), requiring an event-denoting complement, are combined with an entity-denoting complement (e.g., book), as in The author started a book. Previous studies have reported that the entity-denoting complement elicited processing difficulty following verbs that require event argument compared with verbs that do not (e.g., The author wrote a book). While the processing of complement coercion has been extensively studied in Indo-European languages such as English and German, it is relatively under-researched in Sino-Tibetan languages such as Mandarin Chinese. Given the fact that there are many linguistic elements behaving distinctly in the different language families, for instance, verbs with respect to their semantic properties and syntactic representations of the complement, it is meaningful to investigate whether or not the existing linguistic differences have any effect on the processing of complement coercion in Mandarin. With this research goal, we recorded self-paced reading time of 61 native Mandarin speakers to investigate the processing of the entity-denoting complement in sentences with three different verb types (aspectual verbs which require an event-denoting complement, preferred verbs which denote a preferred interpretation of the aspectual expressions, and non-preferred verbs which denote a non-preferred but plausible interpretation of the aspectual expressions), as exemplified in 顾客开始/填写/查看这份问卷 gù-kè kāi-shǐ/tián-xiě/chá-kàn zhè-fèn wèn-juàn “The customer started/filled in/checked the questionnaire.” It was found that the entity noun complement (e.g., 这份问卷 zhè-fèn wèn-juàn “the questionnaire”) elicited significantly longer reading times in coercion sentences than non-coercion counterparts. The results are compatible with the previous findings in English that complement coercion sentences impose processing cost during real-time comprehension. The study contributes empirical evidence to coercion studies cross-linguistically.

Isoglosses and language change: Evidence of the rise and loss of isoglosses from a comparison of early Greek and early English

We analyze the rise and loss of isoglosses in two Indo-European languages, early Greek and early English, which, however, show considerable distance between their structures in many other domains. We follow Keidan’s approach (2013), that has drawn the attention on the fact that the study of isoglosses (i.e., linguistic features common to two or more languages) is connected with common innovations of particular languages after the split into sub-groups of Indo-European: this type of approach aims at collecting isoglosses that appear across the branches of Indo-European. We examine the rise of the isogloss of labile verbs and the loss of the isogloss of the two classes of aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. Our study shows that the rise of labile verbs in both languages is related to the innovative use of intransitives in causative constructions. On the other hand, the innovations in voice morphology follow different directions in Greek and English and are unrelated to the rise of labile verbs. In contrast to labile verbs, which are still predominant for causative-anticausative constructions in both languages, the two classes of aspectual verbs are lost in the later stages of Greek but are predominant even in Present-day English. Again, a “prerequisite” change for the isogloss can be easily located in a structural ambiguity that is relevant for aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. However, another independent development, the changes in verbal complementation (the development of infinitival and participial complements) in Greek and English, determined the loss of this isogloss.

Head movement with semantic effects: Aspectual verb raising in Cantonese

This paper argues that head movement is an operation available in Narrow Syntax (contra Chomsky 2000, i.a.). It provides independent support to a line of research which suggests that head movement can impose interpretive effects. The novel evidence comes from Cantonese aspectual verbs and their interaction with other quantificational elements. I argue that aspectual verbs such as hoici ‘begin’ can undergo head movement, which can enrich the scope possibility of the verb.

I'm done my homework: Complement Coercion and Aspectual Adjectives in Canadian English

Self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies have generally found that combining aspectual verbs (like ‘begin’ and ‘finish’) with entity nouns (like ‘the book’ or ‘the coffee’) is associated with increased reading times on and around the noun (McElree et al. 2001; Traxler et al. 2002; Pickering et al. 2005). This processing cost is widely interpreted as evidence of complement coercion—aspectual verbs semantically select for an event (like ‘dancing’ or ‘the dance’) and can take entity objects only if they are coerced into an event through a computationally costly process of type-shifting (Pustejovsky 1995; Jackendoff 1997). This paper presents an eye-tracking study of the Canadian English ‘be done NP’ construction, e.g., ‘I am done/finished my homework’ (not to be confused with the dialect-neutral ‘I am done/finished WITH my homework’) to mean ‘I have finished my homework’. Results suggest a processing penalty for entity-denoting nouns like ‘the script’ (compared to event description nouns like ‘the audition’) in this construction, which supports Fruehwald & Myler’s (2015) proposal that ‘done’ and ‘finished’ in this construction are aspectual adjectives that behave like aspectual verbs in requiring complement coercion and type-shifting for entity-denoting nouns.

Progressivity Expressions in Hassawi Dialect.

Progressivity expressions in many languages and in some variations in dialectal Arabic are discussed whereas the expressions of the progressive aspect in the eastern Arabian dialect and the Hassawi dialect have not been studied before. Therefore, the main objective of the dissertation is to provide a description of the progressivity expressions in the Hassawi dialect. These expressions denote several meanings: duration, contingent happenings, temporariness, incompletion of actions and, in some instances, they show a ‘temporal frame effect’. It is argued that there are 13 means that denote progressivity in the Hassawi Dialect. Four of them were found in the literature. There are lexical main verbs functioning as aspectual verbs that express continuation such as: the simple form that consists of the imperfective form of activity, accomplishment, frequency, and passive meaning verbs that occur in all tenses and it is used interchangeably with the other progressive constructions showing that there is no opposition between the simple form and the progressive form. In addition, the active participles ‘gaaᶜid/jaalis’ that mean ‘sitting, remaining, staying’ in all tenses, the perfective verbs ‘jalas/gaᶜad’ meaning ‘sat, stayed’and ‘tamm/ Zal’that mean ‘stay,remain.completed’ and ‘stay,reman,continue’, respectively, in the past and the imperfective verbs ‘yagᶜid/yajils –iyZil/iytimm’ in the present and the future preceding the imperfective form of activity, accomplishment, frequency, and passive meaning verbs and in very few cases with the state and achievement verbs. On the other hand, there is also a prepositional phrase ‘fiᶜizz’ behaving aspectually and denoting progressivity in all tenses followed by activity, accomplishment, frequency and a few state verbal nouns. Additionally, there is the active participle of some translocative, activity and very few state verbs in affirmative sentences and with a lot of the activity, and accomplishment verbs in the negative sentences in the present, past and the future. The imperfective and the perfective means are normally negated by ‘maa’ and for the purpose of intensifying the same action or introducing another action, ‘mu’, its variants and the negative copula are used instead. The perfective ‘Zal/tamm’ is either preceded by the negation particle denoting a progressive reading or followed by the negation particle indicating two readings; habitual or progressive. The active participles and the prepositional phrase denoting progressivity are negated by the particle ‘mu’normally in the present tense and by ‘maa’ in the past and the future tenses. Finally, the progressive construction in Hassawi dialect shows clear evidence that support Anderson’s localistic theory which indicates that the notion of location and direction is involved in the different aspect expressions in many languages. In one construction, a locative participle is used and in the other one, a locative prepositional phrase is used.

William of Ockham on the Instant of Change

Ockham’s approach to the problem of the instant of change as it is found in the Summa logicae i, chapter 5, and ii, chapter 19, is usually described as “purely logical,” narrowing the treatment of “begins” and “ceases” to simplistic cases. The aim of this paper is to complement our knowledge of Ockham’s position on the problem of the instant of change by analysing the treatment of the problem he gives in his questions on the Physics 98-101. In these passages, Ockham adopts a “physical approach” in order to deal with problems related to the continuity of alteration and the production of the form of the mix from elementary qualities. To solve these problems, he is compelled to give up one of the most important claims at the basis of the logical approach that he adopted in the Summa logicae, namely that the distinction between permanent and successive entities is not relevant in the assignment of truth-conditions to propositions containing the aspectual verbs “beginning” and “ceasing.”

Composition of multiple dimension representations in context during real-time comprehension

We investigate the role of context in the comprehension of competing semantic representations of sentences with aspectual verbs (AspVs). On the Structured Individual Hypothesis, AspVs select for structured individuals as their complement, construed as a directed axis along various dimensions. During comprehension, the verb’s lexical functions are exhaustively retrieved and the AspV+complement composition yields multiple mutually exclusive dimension representations, which are later constrained by context. Results from this eye-movement study show that AspV sentences engender additional processing cost independent of context. That is, while processing multiple dimension representations is costly, the exhaustive lexical retrieval and dimension composition are initially encapsulated from context.