imperfective aspect
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This article studies functional and semantic Tense/Aspect complexes in Russian and English, focusing on their similarities and differences. In Russian, Tense-Aspect meanings of the verb forms correlate with the semantic components of Aktionsart, while in English both Imperfective and Perfective aspects of the verb semantics are realized by the constituent category of Tense/Aspect. The inner asymmetry of the verb forms and meanings is acknowledged for each of the contrastive languages, especially for the two languages compared. The material of the study is retrieved from grammar books and manuals and from literary text samples, principally concerns the use of Tense/Aspect forms of the Russian verb and the forms of the English Perfect. The novelty impact of the study is determined by focusing on the irregularity of the aspectual meanings of English Perfect forms and Tense/Aspect forms of the Russian verb, whereas they are mostly due to lexical meanings of the verbs influenced by intralinguistic specificities of the semantics of lexical indicators as well as mechanisms of communication on the whole. Aspectual meanings both for the Perfective and Imperfective Aspect in languages under comparison used to make up lexical and grammatical aspectual categorical complexes. In terms of Aspect and Tense, peculiarities are found as functional and semantic ones, highly dependent on the situation and context of communication, thus involving extralinguistic factors which also concern the extralinguistic environment of Tense/Aspect verbal forms in use. The comparison of functions and the semantics of Aspect and Aktionsart in the Russian language with those of English Perfect asymmetry is proved to emerge, being caused by cross-linguistic structural and typological differences, particularly, the existence or not the similar forms, their varying semantic load, analytical or synthetic tendencies and others. The asymmetry is especially vividly seen translation and lexicographic field to compose varying kinds of bilingual dictionaries.

This paper attempts to highlight common errors made by Serbian learners of L2 Modern Greek in relation to verbal aspect. It begins by exploring terms such as aspect and perfectivity in the Modern Greek language and then presents an analysis based on the written performance of our sample group. This analysis is crucial since it examines the way in which the written production of the participants evolved over the four years of their academic studies, something that deepens our understanding of the way this grammatical area is acquired by Serbian learners.

This dissertation investigates the semantics of each tense and aspect in Xhosa. Since tense and aspect perform important pragmatic functions, the analysis takes into account the correlation between the verb and the wider discourse in which it is embedded. Tense reflects the temporal relation between the time of the utterance (speech time) and an interval the speaker makes the assertion about (reference time). The Remote Past and the Remote Future tenses differ from their Recent/Immediate counterparts in that they denote events which occurred in a significantly different situation than the speech time and/or events in the surrounding discourse. Aspect does not only indicate the relation between the time occupied by the real world event and the reference time chosen by the speaker. The Perfective aspect represents an event as a unique change-of-state that pertains to a single point on the timeline which at the same time functions as the reference time. By contrast, for the Imperfective aspect temporally links the event to a contextually provided reference time, e.g. the utterance time, a time adverbial, a period of time previously introduced in the preceding discourse, or the interlocutors’ shared experience. At the pragmatic level, the Perfective aspect tends to introduce an event’s resulting state into the discourse, whereas the Imperfective aspect tends to rule it out. Like the Imperfective aspect, the Anterior and the Prospective aspects assert an event’s occurrence from a contextually defined reference time. They refer to the consequent and the preparatory states of an event, respectively. On the pragmatic level, the Anterior aspect may also indicate that the truth-conditionality of the event’s resulting state is contradicted in the immediate discourse. This study shows that tense and aspect temporally represent different means of temporally assigning an event to a particular portion of the timeline. I further argue that aspect indicates whether the reference time is provided in the context (Imperfective, Anterior, Prospective) or whether it is introduced by the verb itself (Perfective). Furthermore, this study shows that aspect exhibits a pragmatic function by laying focus on different parts of the event that are relevant in the upcoming discourse.

Abstract In the Aramaic of Daniel, the imperfect expresses past situations 29 times. Scholars have long wrestled with these past time uses, and although important contributions have been made along the way, one of the most salient semantic issues that arise with these uses—the semantic intersection of imperfective aspect and telicity—has been overlooked. This study addresses this issue directly by providing a linguistic analysis of the past imperfective uses of the imperfect that describes their semantics in light of situation aspect and (un)boundedness. This study also describes the past modal use of the imperfect, and offers a linguistic explanation for how the imperfect acquired such a use. Ultimately, this study provides a linguistic analysis of the past time uses of the imperfect that fosters more artful and nuanced readings of the text in light of its semantic and functional sophistication.

Abstract The biblical Hebrew tense system has two aspects: the perfective, indicating a completed action, and an imperfective aspect, denoting an action that has not yet ended. From the period of the rabbinic sages of the first centuries CE to today’s Modern Hebrew, an absolute tense system has been the norm, employing past, present, and future. This change in the system of tenses influenced the meaning of names created in the Qatal and Yiqtol patterns. The reason for the changed meanings is Modern Hebrew speakers’ lack of proficiency in the biblical system of tenses. To shed light on the language and culture of Modern Hebrew speakers, this article presents biblical and modern given names in the Yiqtol pattern and explains the changes in the modern names.

Abstract This study revisits the linguistic properties of preverbal zai in Mandarin Chinese. Specifically, it examines the syntax of a prepositional phrase headed by zai functioning as an adjunct, as the main predicate of a sentence with a continuous reading, as well as a sentence containing zai with a progressive reading. It is argued that there is only one zai and that it always functions as a preposition selecting either a Locative Phrase (LP) or a Zeit Phrase (ZP) as its complement. The study also claims that the different aspectual readings of sentences containing zai are a result of the different types of complements zai selects. It is argued that a sentence has a continuous reading when zai selects an LP and a progressive one when it selects a ZP as its complement. The proposed analyses not only provide a unified account of the linguistic functions of zai but also give a syntactic account of the close relation between the imperfective aspect (in particular, the progressive aspect) and locative elements that has been observed by many previous studies.

The aim of the study was to investigate how Serbian native speaking preschool children comprehend perfective and imperfective aspect in comparison to adults. After watching animated movies with complete, incomplete and unstarted actions, the participants were asked questions with a perfective or imperfective verb form and responded by pointing to the event(s) that corresponded to each question. The results converged to a clear developmental trend in understanding of aspectual forms. The data indicate that the acquisition of perfective precedes the acquisition of imperfective: 3-year-olds typically understand only the meaning of perfective; most 5-year-olds have almost adult-like understanding of both aspectual forms, while 4-year-olds are a transitional group. Our results support the viewpoint that children's and adults? representations of this language category differ qualitatively, and we argue that mastering of aspect semantics is a long-term process that presupposes a certain level of cognitive and pragmatic development, and lasts throughout the preschool period.

Whilst heritage Spanish has been widely examined in the USA, less is known about the acquisition of Spanish in other English-dominant contexts such as the UK, and studies rarely assess the baseline grammar that heritage speakers are exposed to directly. In this study, we implemented a semantic interpretation task to 17 bilinguals in the UK to investigate child heritage speakers’ and their parents’ comprehension of the preterite–imperfect aspectual contrast in Spanish, an area of known difficulty. The results show that the parents are consistently more accurate in accepting and rejecting the appropriate morphemes than the children. Further analysis shows that children’s accuracy was best predicted by age at time of testing, suggesting that young heritage speakers of Spanish in the UK can acquire the target grammar. However, this general increase in accuracy with age was not found for the continuous reading of imperfective aspect. This finding implicates a more nuanced role of cross-linguistic influence in early heritage speakers’ grammar(s), and partially explains greater difficulty with the imperfect observed in production studies with other heritage speakers.

This paper proposes an account for the four auxiliaries in Kazakh that express the imperfective aspect. The main factors – the auxiliary, the main verb, their inflections and the aspectual specifications reveal a complicated system, which can be captured with an appropriate monotonic, multiple inheritance type hierarchy using online-type construction with the implementation of Pāṇinian competition. This analysis sheds light to a very different auxiliary system that we find in Indo-European languages.

The study is concerned with the phonological reduction in Pashto. The study particularly focuses on the reduction in the structure of complex predicates, verbal clitics and postpositional phrases in Pashto. The study finds out that the phonological reduction has syntactic/semantic or phonological factors allowing or constraining it. These more or less reduced and expanded forms are closely related to a number of linguistics abstractions. In structures with verbal clitics and postpositions, the reduction is optional, while in structure with complex predicates, the phonological reduction is obligatory if the compound verb denotes imperfective aspect. The obligatory reduction makes a single phonological unit from two syntactic units by omitting consonants or vowels in the structure of the phrase. The reduction is avoided if it creates an ambiguity of some kind or if the meaning of the lexical items is changed, and so, its allowance in one structure is constrained in another.