Aspect construal in Mandarin: a usage-based constructionist perspective on LE

Despite extensive research efforts to explain the Mandarin Chinese particle le, confusion persists in the absence of a unitary theory and sufficient empirical evidence. This study provides a unitary account of le by adopting a usage-based constructionist approach, one that liberates grammatical aspect from, and is able to accommodate, lexical aspect. We argue that le participates in two distinct family resemblance constructions of aspect construal associated with two distinct sentential positions. The clause-internal le construction construes the closing or final boundary of an event and the clause-final le construction construes the opening or initial boundary of an event. Corpus analysis showed that the two aspect constructions have distinct patterns in natural language uses that are consistent with the proposed construals. Results from elicited response data showed that native speakers paid attention to construction-level formal and semantic cues in making family resemblance judgments about tokens of the two constructions. This study has both theoretical and methodological implications for crosslinguistic research on grammatical aspect in relation to lexical aspect and for usage-based constructionist approaches to grammatical categories beyond aspect.

Learning aspect in Italian as additional language. The role of second languages

The study examines the role played by English and Romance languages (L2s) when learning grammatical aspect in Italian as additional language (Ln). Swedish university students of Italian (n = 34), divided according to knowledge of a Romance L2 and English aspectual knowledge, completed an interpretation task of aspectual contrast in Italian. Eight native speakers served as a control group. The findings showed that knowledge of a Romance language as L2 and high English aspectual knowledge exerted a differential influence on learning aspect in Italian. This outcome is discussed in the light of a consistent form-meaning relationship between the L2s and Italian. Yet, with a mismatch between grammatical and lexical aspect, the learners’ judgments differed from the native speakers’ judgments. Thus, our findings also support the idea of the existence of differential learning paths sustained by the L2s when learning complex aspectual configurations.

Aspect in Heritage Greek: evidence from elicited production and online judgments

This study tests grammatical aspect in adult Heritage Speakers (HSs) of Greek in Germany (HSs-Germany) and the US (HSs-US), a topic which has not been investigated before for this language, exploring the role of the dominant language and the default value as an acquisition strategy. In an oral elicitation task (Experiment 1) targeting the production of aspectual marking in Greek, Greek monolinguals (MSs) and HSs-Germany exhibited ceiling performance, while HSs-US were significantly less accurate. Education in Greek reliably predicted their accuracy. In a speeded Grammaticality Judgment task (Experiment 2) targeting the comprehension of aspect in a Grammaticality x Aspect repeated measures design, similar results were obtained for the grammatical conditions as in Experiment 1. In ungrammatical conditions, accuracy on aspect was affected for all groups, and this was more evident for HSs. HSs-US were overall less accurate with the morphologically marked form (perfective). Decision Times (DTs) revealed that only MSs and HSs-Germany were sensitive to aspect violations exhibiting longer DTs. Education in Greek reliably predicted accuracy and DTs. The results are discussed within the realm of heritage languages, language contact, and aspect acquisition in Greek bilingual populations. Finally, certain novel verbal forms produced by HSs are also discussed.

Emotive verbs of the Russian language in the semantic and grammatical aspect

The article is devoted to the consideration of the lexical-grammatical and semantic features of converting pairs of emotive verbs in the Russian language such as “????????? – ???????, ??????????? – ?????????, ????????? – ???????, ???????? – ??????”. These verbs form an opposition having a grammatical, derivational and semantic character. In terms of the semantic relationship, the transitive verb is more complex, since it contains “causation”, while the formal relationship, on the contrary, means greater complexity of the reflexive verb, which has a postfix “-??”. The constitutive semantic features of emotive verbs of the Russian language are “unintentional action”, “focus on the object” (for a transitive verb) and self-isolation (reflexive verb), the ability to describe an emotional state, emotional experience, emotional attitude.

Grammatical and cognitive factors shaping the conceptualization of motion events

Motion event construal gives insight into the nature of the linguistic and conceptual representations underlying the encoding of events. Studies show that event descriptions differ cross-linguistically due to, amongst other factors, the absence or presence of grammatical aspect. While speakers of aspect languages generally focus on the process, speakers of non-aspect languages tend to perceive the event holistically and focus on endpoints. This investigation examines visual endpoint salience as a further factor that shapes event encoding. Thus, in this model, grammatical aspect is seen as a part of a more complex system of factors that determine event construal. The analyses, which cover German speakers, English speakers, and German-speaking learners of English, involve linguistic production data and results from memory performance tests. The findings show that the focus on endpoints increases for salient stimuli. While German speakers and learners of English show a tendency to focus on endpoints, a clear preference for focusing on the process can be observed in English speakers. Verbalizing endpoints correlates with the ability to remember them in a memorization task. The implications of these outcomes are discussed in the context of two factors which shape event encoding: grammatical aspect and endpoint salience.

Medical Books of the 17th–18th Centuries from the Siberian Archives: Structural-and-Grammatical Aspect

The article presents a comparative study of two medical books from the Siberian archives dating back to the 17 th –18 th centuries: Tobolsk Lechebnik (TL) kept in Tobolsk Book Depository, and Altai Lechebnik (AL) stored in Altai Museum of Local Lore – both stemming from the text of the medical book called "Prokhladnyi Vertograd (The Cool Garden)" from the collection of the Rumyantsev Museum (PV). Our findings show that Siberian medical books demonstrate different degrees of structural and grammatical transformation of the source PV text, conventionally considered by the authors of the research to be a list, which is chronologically closer to the original text. It was established that TL can be regarded as a list derived from the PV, and AL – a source reflecting a further stage in the process of text generation in the institutional medical discourse. We claim that the intentional and grammatical perspective of the medical text formation is associated with the modal variability of verbal lexemes: the prevailing in PV and TL personal verb forms reflect the presence of the subject of speech as an agent in special communication; in AL these are replaced by infinitives which transform the real modality of the message about an action "from experience" (in PV and TL) into a syntactic categorical imperative.It was also determined that the subject of the action expressed by personal verb forms is typically generalized (in this case, special actions of the doctor and the patient can be detected through the difference in the verbal lexemes). The subject is not grammatically defined with the infinitive verb forms.

Actionality and the degree of temporal dynamics

The interaction of lexical actionality with grammatical aspect is explained in a comprehensive system, based on the “degree of temporal dynamics” of simple and complex actional classes and of the various functions, expressed by aspect grammemes (extended ILA model, focus aspect). Then a new conceptualization of less frequent aspect phenomena is presented. A novelty is the differentiation of focus aspect from status aspect, characterized by habitualization and the transformation of telic events into atelic activities. Argument structures are claimed to be responsible for class changes, especially with respect to the incorporative (INCO) class, combining activity, telicity and a subsequent state.

Two-phase verbs: a crosslinguistic look at an actional class

This paper documents the properties and realizations of the actional (aspectual, Aktionsart) class of two-phase verbs, with a particular focus on languages with inflectional (obligatory) grammatical aspect. The paper adopts a descriptive (non-formal) and typological perspective. Two-phase verbs are defined, for the purposes of the paper, as verbs whose inflectional (obligatory) aspect grams (e.g., imperfective, progressive, etc.) can express both the durative phase of the situation leading up to the culmination, as well as the durative phase resulting from that culmination. The realizations of the class in perfective-imperfective languages are compared to realizations in two languages with idiosyncratic aspect systems, Belhare and Nyakyusa.