Delimiting durative events with manner

Durative events by default are atelic. However, temporal targets are typically required for durative verbs with a rushing manner, such as ‘We are catching the 3:30 flight’ and ‘The farmer rushed to harvest before the storm’. Why and how does manner introduce delimiting temporal concepts to durative verbs? This puzzle is addressed by our current study of two near-synonymous Mandarin durative verbs describing events carried out in a rushing manner: 赶 gǎn and 抢 qiǎng. Our event-base account will examine both their compositional meanings and their constructional patterns. We will show that 赶 gǎn and 抢 qiǎng not only coerce eventive readings from their nominal objects, but also require certain delineating temporal targets. The verb 赶 gǎn requires an understood deadline, while the verb 抢 qiǎng requires the presupposition of the limited availability of the object. As neither temporal targets mark the time of the actual activities, these are exceptional cases of aktionsart. We will show that the different ways to delineate event meanings of the constructions [gǎn/qiǎng+ noun] can be predicted from the lexical meaning of the two verbs and can in turn predict the event types represented by the object with the MARVS theory. Based on this lexical semantic representation, we further show that the Generative Lexicon theory predicts the coercions of the rushing meaning from the original activity verb senses, and that the Construction Grammar theory accounts for their sharing of the same syntactic configuration.

The Contrastive Analysis of Inchoative Aspect of Japanese and Indonesian Language

Compound verb –dasu in Japanese language, adverb mulai (start), and adverb baru (just) in Indonesian language are marks of inchoative aspect. This research aims to describe the difference and similarity of those three marks of inchoative aspect. The method applied in this research is intralingual padan method. As the result of the research, it is proven that compound verb –dasu and adverb baru are focusing on the beginning of an activity or alteration, meanwhile adverb mulai (start) is a sign of the beginning of an event with an exact finished oriented. Compound verb –dasu, adverb mulai (start), and adverb baru can be constructed as activity verb and punctual verb, both volitional and non volitional with animate and inanimate as the subject. Then, the differences are compound verb –dasu shows the beginning of an event that happens suddenly, meanwhile the adverb mulai (start) and baru (just) do not; beside, the adverb mulai (start) can be modified as stative verb, adjective and noun, meanwhile compund verb –dasu can not.

Marcello lächelt sein Mastroianni-Lächeln

Sentences with a cognate object typically consist of an intransitive activity verb, its subject NP and a second NP in the accusative. Its nominal core is typically derived as nomen actionis and/or nomen acti from the verb. Essential questions are: How are cognate objects licensed? What role do they play in verbal activity? Which nouns and which verbs come into question? Can the reading of cognitive objects be predicted as an event or object? In this paper I will propose a constructional grammatical analysis. Different readings of the cognate object as well as the temporal constitution as a telic or atelic situation are explained within the construction by compositional processes. These are essentially analyzed as a transfer of the nominal reference mode to the entire VP. The nominal reference method also results from compositional processes within the NP. An important focus of the analysis is on overrides and adjustments (coercion) in case of semantic conflicts.

Exploring Aktionsart in Corpora: A Case Study of Koine Greek Erchomai and Eiserchomai

Presented here is an analysis of the effect of the Koine Greek preverb eis- on the lexical aspect of the Koine verb erchomai 'go/come'. To determine the effect of eis-, I demonstrate the lexical aspect of the simplex erchomai and its prefixed form eis-erchomai by annotating all instances of both verbs in the Greek New Testament. Methodology for determining the lexical aspect of the two verbs is adapted from methodology used for languages in which native speaker intuitions are accessible. Applying some of these tests to the corpora, I conclude that erchomai is an activity verb and eiserchomai is a telic verb. This result confirms Buist Fanning's (1990) classification of the same verbs, though he used different methodology to come to this conclusion. Additional ways of developing aktionsart tests for corpora are suggested.

Aspect and Verbal Prepositions

In this paper, we explore some previously unanalysed interactions between verbal aktionsart and prepositional complementation in Norwegian, namely the alternations between a DP object and PP complements with <em>på</em> ‘on/at’ and <em>til</em> ‘to/at’. We argue that a simple account based on [±telic] or [±quantized] features cannot be correct. Instead, we generalize the notion of path and homomorphism, and integrate it in a syntactic theory of how complex events are built up compositionally. The path structure introduced by the PP interacts with the path structure of the VP to produce complex events based on ‘homomorphic unity’ in much the same way as has been argued for in the Verb + Nominal domain (Krifka 1992). Specifically, an extended location (a <em>på</em>-PP) in the complement of and activity verb (in our terms, a process subevental projection) gives rise to a non-directed path for the event; a point location ( a <em>til</em>-PP) in the complement of an accomplishment verb (one which in our terms will contain a result subevental projection) gives rise to the specification of an endpoint.

The lexical typological profile of Swedish mental verbs

The lexical typological profile of a language is a crosslinguistically valid characterization of its lexical structure with particular focus on basic features which are language-specific. The paper deals with basic mental verbs in Swedish from this perspective based on data from translation corpora against the background of available information about typological patterns. A brief sketch is given of language-specific characteristics of the nuclear verb se ‘see’ which is the primary equivalent of English see but is also frequently used as an equivalent of look used as an activity verb (look at) and as a phenomenon-based verb (e.g. look happy). The extensive pattern of polysemy of the verb känna ‘feel’ is dealt with in detail and turns out to have several language-specific characteristics even in comparison with closely related languages such as German and English. Swedish veta is shown to have a more restricted extension beyond its basic meaning than its primary English equivalent know. English in this case appears to represent a more common pattern than Swedish judging from available typological data. A major section is also devoted to the semantic differentiation between the three basic verbs of thinking tänka-tro-tycka which represents one of the major language-specific characteristics of Swedish mental verbs.

Subjectivity and the English progressive

According to Wright (1994a), subjectivity in the English progressive is typically associated with specific linguistic features. In particular, subjective progressives are said normally to occur in main clauses and to involve an adverb(ial) of the type always, a first- or second-person pronominal subject and a private or cognitive verb in the present tense. This study tests Wright's claim against a corpus of Early Modern English prose. The focus is on the kind of subjective progressives that are claimed by Wright to be most subjective of all, namely collocations of the progressive with adverbs such as always. It is shown that the ‘always progressives’ in the corpus are typically found in a subclause, in collocation with an activity verb, and that they commonly occur with different types of subjects and tense/mood combinations. The conclusion is therefore that Wright's predictions concerning typical linguistic contexts for subjective progressives are not borne out.

Aspects Of (Un)Boundedness

Resultative predicates have the aspectual effect of telicizing an atelic activity verb. The function of the postverbal constituent in accomplishments has been taken to be one of providing an end point to the activity, or of a constituent that "measures out" the event denoted by the activity verb. In either case, it delimits the event by providing it with boundaries. Looking at resultative predicates, we observe that they are subject to the requirement that they denote a bounded scale. This requirement is argued to be empirically superior to an alternative restriction stating that the resultative must be a stage-level predicate. The boundedness requirement furthermore provides direct evidence against an approach that treats the resultative as an end point, and supports the claim that it is an event measure. One piece of evidence concerns the 'make + NP+Adjective' construction, in which the adjective denotes the final stage or end point in a change of state, exactly as in the resultative construction. In contrast to the resultative, however, the adjective can be unbounded, as it is not an event measure in this case. We argue that the boundedness requirement on resultative predicates follows directly from treating it as an event measure, since a measure must be bounded as a matter of conceptual necessity.

The defective tense hypothesis: on the emergence of tense and aspect in child Polish

ABSTRACTLongitudinal and cross-sectional designs were combined in this analysis of the evolution of children's capacity to represent deictic relationships. The longitudinal component contained the naturalistic observation of three relatively young children (1; 7–1; 9) and three somewhat older children (2; 0–2; 2). These children were tape-recorded in caretaker–child interactions. The analysis of the corpora from these children revealed: (1) imperfective activity verb phrases in the past tense, (2) telic verb phrases in the past tense used independently of resulting states, (3) moderately remote past references, and (4) deictic future references. The cross-sectional component contained an experiment in which elicitation procedures were used to obtain past and future references to atelic and telic situations. Nine 2½- and nine 3½-year-old children were tested. Generally high levels of performance reinforced the outcome of the longitudinal analysis.