Finite Verb Forms Research Articles

General converbs in Andi

AbstractThis paper describes the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of general converb constructions in Andi, a language of the Avar-Andic group of the East Caucasian language family. There are two general converbs in Andi, both of which are homophonous with a finite verb form (the aorist and the perfect, respectively). There is a considerable functional overlap between the two converbs. Both can be used to render the first stage of a complex event. The perfect / converb can also specify manner. An additive particlelooften accompanies the perfect as converb, while a specialised particlelodːuappears with the aorist as converb. The situation in Andi is unusual, because the two converbs are functionally very similar and not opposed in terms of aspect. In addition, Andi seems to be the only East Caucasian language where a specialised particle (i.e.lodːu) is found in this type of converbal clauses.

The death of a virtuous woman? Proverbs 31.10-31, gnomic qatal, and the role of translation in the analysis of the Hebrew verbal system

This article draws attention to the phenomenon of translation-based interference in the analysis of Biblical Hebrew. It is argued that the so-called gnomic qatal only exists when we translate certain passages in a certain way. Based on Joüon’s approach to the verbs in Prov 31.10-31, it is demonstrated that it is possible to interpret the woman in the poem as deceased. Consequently, the predominant verbal forms in the passage ( qatal and wayyiqtol) are not gnomic, contrary to the almost universal rendering of the forms as present tense in modern translations. Rather, they have their usual anterior meaning. Other examples of translation-based interference in the analysis of Biblical Hebrew (including the question of the verbs in biblical poetry) are discussed, and a case is made for relative tense as the appropriate category for describing the semantic content of the basic opposition between the (non-volitive) finite verbal forms.

ЛИНГВОСТИЛИСТИЧЕСКИЕ СРЕДСТВА КОНТЕКСТНО-ВАРИАТИВНОГО ЧЛЕНЕНИЯ ТЕКСТА ДРЕВНЕАНГЛИЙСКОЙ ПОЭМЫ "МОРЕСТРАННИК"

The article is concerned with the analysis of the linguostylistic means used to effect contextual segmentation of the Old English elegy The Seafarer. It is hypothesized that discourse types of the poem including narration with some elements of description, reasoning and implicit dialogue are the key means to convey the author’s main idea. The focus of the study is on the use of the principal lexical and grammatical markers indicating the change of discourse types: personal pronouns of the 1st and 3rd person, finite verb forms and connotationally diversified vocabulary. In the narrative part, the emphasis is made on the extensive use of pronominal and verb forms of the 1st person singular as well as on the prevalence of emotive lexical units with negative meaning. Reasoning was discovered to be characterized by the domination of the 3rd person forms and balanced use of lexical units with negative and positive semantics. Implicit dialogue was found to be notably rich in pronominal forms of the 1st person plural and causative modality expressed by lexical and grammatical means. We conclude that the poem under study features a triform composition built by various linguistic means on the grammatical, lexical and stylistic levels.

The Use of the Perfect in Daniel 7:27

The use of the perfect in Dan 7:27 has thus far eluded explanation. Each of the various suggestions offered has significant problems. In this study, I propose a new, contextually sound and linguistically informed explanation, arguing that the verb יהיבת (G passive perfect third-person feminine singular) expresses a future, passive state. The contextually determined time reference of the verb is future, and typological evidence strongly suggests that the perfect in the Aramaic of Daniel can have future time reference. Additionally, drawing on crosslinguistic semantic distinctions of passive constructions, I argue that there is a semantic difference between the G passive and Gt stems in the Aramaic of Daniel (and Ezra) and that the G passive stem was used in Dan 7:27 in order to express a passive state. The use of the perfect rather than the imperfect results from the use of the G passive (as opposed to the Gt), because the Gp of √יהב has a limited distribution in the finite verb forms, occurring only in the perfect and never in the imperfect.

Конструкции с депиктивными второстепенными предикатами со своим собственным грамматическим субъектом в сибирских тюркских языках

Specific syntactic constructions of complex predicates that assign more than one predicate to their semantic subject are well known cross-linguistically. Examples of such constructions are structures such as He returned tired, lived alone, worked as a teacher, etc. They contain two semantic predicates – a main one expressed by a finite verb form, and a secondary one, often expressed by a nominal form or an infinite verb form. Our research has shown that depictive predicates have their structural and functional peculiarities in different South Siberian Turkic languages, compared between themselves and with depictives in Oguz and Kypchak languages. The article deals with South Siberian depictive secondary predicates and describes their semantic and structural types. A special attention is paid to depictive predicates having a subject, different from the subject of the main predicate.

Small clauses in English and Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian / Male klauze u engleskom i bosanskom, hrvatskom i srpskom jeziku

Small Clauses in English represent one of the basic concepts of modern generative grammar and they are characterized as minimal units of non-verbal predication, where the predication relation between the subject and the predicate is established in the absence of a finite verb form. In traditional grammars, they are generally referred to as “secondary predication” constructions. As the concept of a “small clause” is not familiar in the context of traditional descriptive grammars of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, the aim of this paper is to make a preliminary contrastive analysis of how these or similar constructions are realized in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian through translation equivalents and how they are treated in traditional grammars. Additionally, we have applied several tests typically used in English literature to prove the constituency of small clauses in order to establish whether or not these constructions could form a separate constituent at the sentence level in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian as well.

Aspects of the Morphophonology of the Verb in Latin and in German and English

Aspects of the Morphophonology of the Verb in Latin and in German and English

Типы односоставных предложений в пословичном фонде башкирского языка (на материале фольклорного корпуса)

Goals. The article is devoted to the study of Proverbs of the Bashkir language represented by one-member verbal sentences. All productive models of one-member verbal sentences in Bashkir Proverbs are analyzed in detail, the statistics of distribution of sentences by syntactic types are presented. Materials. The texts of paremiological genres included in the Corpus of folklore texts of the Bashkir language were used as a material. Today, the proverbial database of the Corpus under consideration is the most representative in the Bashkir paremiology and includes texts of the proverbial genre published in separate volumes of the multi-volume academic publication “The Bashkir Folk Art”, expedition materials issued by the staff of the Department of folkloristics of the Institiute of History, Language, and Literature UFRC RAS wounds over the last 20 years. Results. The authors show that the functioning of Proverbs in the Bashkir language with the structure of one-member verbal sentences is primarily associated with their generalizing character, which is expressed by the personal-temporal use of the verbal predicate. In the sentences under study, predicates expressed by a finite verb and analytical forms report actions and States regardless of a particular person. The subject of the action acts as a generalized person. It is revealed that in the Corpus of folklore of the Bashkir language Proverbs of the considered type consist of generalized-personal, impersonal, indefinite-personal sentences. The prevalence of the imperative in Bashkir Proverbs in comparison with other verbal categories is determined, which points to the characteristic feature of the Bashkir paremia, aimed at expressing the will and didactics, which states the function of Proverbs in statistical terms is much inferior to the imperative.

CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF TENSE AND ASPECT IN ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN LANGUAGE

This study aims to find out the comparison between English and Indonesian terms of finite verb form, tense and aspect. Language is the medium used by human to convey the contents of their minds. Language is also an object of study in educational institutions. Examples of interesting language to study and learn are English and Indonesian language, because each of them has distinct characteristics. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative study. The result of this study shows that there are four groups of verb forms in English: simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous forms. Each of the groups has present, past, and future forms. This scientific paper will contribute empirical data from English and Indonesian language that will support contrastive analysis theory.

A concept-oriented analysis of future-time reference in native and near-native Hexagonal French

ABSTRACTThis study examined how native and near-native speakers of Hexagonal French make reference to future events in a corpus of informal conversations. A concept-oriented analysis reveals that no fewer than 13 different finite verb forms appeared in future-time contexts. A qualitative analysis of the use of the present in future-time contexts in the two portions of the corpus points to similarities in the native-speaker and near-native-speaker use. This analysis contributes to the understanding of future-time expression in Hexagonal French and to discussions concerning near-nativeness in second language acquisition.

From enclitic to prefix: diachrony of personal absolutive markers in Q’eqchi’

Q’eqchi’ (Mayan stock, K’ichean subgroup) is an ergative language; a finite verb form obligatorily carries information on the person and number of the absolutive participant, i.e., the unique argument of an intransitive verb or the direct object of a transitive one. The set of personal absolutive markers includes five morphemes; the third person singular has no overt marker. These morphemes in Modern Q’eqchi’ are prefixes in a finite verbal predication and enclitics in a non-finite predication. In a finite verb form, the place of an absolutive prefix is between the tense-aspect prefix and personal ergative prefix (in a transitive predication) or verb root (in an intransitive one). This paper argues that during Colonial Q’eqchi’ (used in the second half of the 16th century and slightly later) the general structure of a verbal complex was completely different, and all personal absolutive markers were in fact enclitics. They were enclitisized to tense-aspect morphemes that functioned syntactically as main predicates of a complex construction. Further diachronic change consolidated a verbal complex, conditioning the transition to affixation.

Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children’s declaratives and Wh- questions

One of the most striking features of children’s early multi-word speech is their tendency to produce non-finite verb forms in contexts in which a finite verb form is required (Optional Infinitive [OI] errors, Wexler, 1994). MOSAIC is a computational model of language learning that simulates developmental changes in the rate of OI errors across several different languages by learning compound finite constructions from the right edge of the utterance (Freudenthal, Pine, Aguado-Orea, & Gobet, 2007; Freudenthal, Pine, & Gobet, 2006a, 2009). However, MOSAIC currently only simulates the pattern of OI errors in declaratives, and there are important differences in the cross-linguistic patterning of OI errors in declaratives and Wh- questions. In the present study, we describe a new version of MOSAIC that learns from both the right and left edges of the utterance. Our simulations demonstrate that this new version of the model is able to capture the cross-linguistic patterning of OI errors in declaratives in English, Dutch, German and Spanish by learning from declarative input, and the cross-linguistic patterning of OI errors in Wh- questions in English, German and Spanish by learning from interrogative input. These results show that MOSAIC is able to provide an integrated account of the cross-linguistic patterning of OI errors in declaratives and Wh- questions, and provide further support for the view, instantiated in MOSAIC, that OI errors are compound-finite utterances with missing modals or auxiliaries.

Sequence-of-tense and the features of finite tenses

<p>Sequence-of-tense (SOT) is often described as a (past) tense verb form that does not correspond to a semantically interpretable tense. Since SOT clauses behave in other respects like finite clauses, the question arises as to whether the <em>syntactic category</em> Tense has to be distinguished from the <em>functional category</em> tense. I claim that SOT clauses do in fact contain interpretable PRESENT tense. The “past” form is analyzed as a manifestation of agreement with the (matrix past) controller of the SOT clause evaluation time. One implication of this analysis is that finite verb forms should be analyzed as representing features that correspond to functional categories higher in clause structure, including those of the clausal left periphery. SOT morphology then sheds light on the existence of a series of finer-grained functional heads that contribute to tense construal, and to verbal paradigms. These include Tense, Modality and Force.</p>

The Verbless Subjunctive in Russian

The Russian subjunctive particle by can be used in constructions that lack any finite verb form, such as constructions with infinitives, predicative adverbs, predicative adjectives, nouns and other nominal parts of speech. I compare the properties of these constructions and argue that all verbless subjunctives share a common semantic component – a positive evaluation of the given situation, most often a wish. Further, unlike ordinary subjunctive with past tense forms, verbless constructions do not express counterfactuality. They also represent main clause phenomena: they are not used in subordinate clauses. Finally, a survey of subjunctive verbless constructions attested in the texts of the nineteenth century shows that the evolution of the optative meaning took place relatively recently.

Minor Complementation Patterns in Post-classical Greek (I–VI AD): A Socio-historical Analysis of a Corpus of Documentary Papyri

Classical Greek (V–IV BC) is known for the complexity of its complementation system, involving infinitival, participial, and finite verb forms. In Post-classical Greek (III BC–VI AD), a simplification of this system takes place, whereby finite complementation becomes much more frequent, and ὅτι is used as a “generic” complementizer. This article analyses to what extent complementation patterns other than ὅτι with a finite verb form and the accusative with the infinitive are still used in the Post-classical period (I–VI AD), focusing on documentary sources (i.e. letters and petitions). I show that various “minor” complementation patterns are (still) attested; some of them are known from Classical Greek, while others are entirely new formations. I furthermore argue that “factivity” and “formality” are two key factors in explaining the distribution of these patterns.

The Quantitative Grammar and Poetics of Finite Verb Forms in the Guslʹ Dobroglasnaia by Simeon Polotsky

The paper offers data on the quantity and structure of finite verbal forms in Simeon Polotsky’s collection Guslʹ Dobroglasnaia. The results are compared to data from twenty epinician odes by Mikhail Lomonosov and ten odes by Gavriil Derzhavin. We find 851 personal forms in Simeon’s collection, of which 214 belong to past tenses (73 to imperfect, 92 to aorist, 49 to past tense with l morpheme); 363 belong to present tense; 99 to future tense; 51 to imperative mood; 6 to conjunctive mood; and 118 to the forms with the da particle. The total percentage of past tenses in Simeon’s texts (25.1%) is close to the parameters appearing in Lomonosov’s and Derzhavin’s texts (21.4% and 23.5%, respectively), and the same is true for the percentages of non-indicative moods (20.5% vs. 19.1% and 20.5%). Simeon Polotsky’s texts contain fewer present tense forms than those written by the 18th-century poets (42.8% vs. 50.6% and 49.5%), but they contain more future tense forms (11.6% vs. 8.9% and 6.5%). Past tense forms in Simeon’s texts with l suffix include 29 forms of the third person with the auxiliary iestʹ verb, usually given in a rhyme position. In the aorist, the proportion of imperfective and perfective forms to the forms of the byti verb is 9:72:11; in imperfect, this proportion is 52:6:15; and in past tenses with l suffix, it is 8:38:3. We find 99 forms of the future tense, broken down as follows: 69 are forms of simple future; 12 are accompanied by imatʹ and similar forms; and 18 are accompanied by budet and similar forms (there is no semantic difference between these two last cases). Of the forms containing the da particle, 65 belong to present tense, 37 belong to future tense, and 16 are accompanied by byti forms.

Combined effects of age of onset and input on the development of different grammatical structures

This study investigates the combined effects of Age of Onset of Acquisition (AOA) and quality and quantity of input on the development of three grammatical structures in French. In a longitudinal and multiple case study including successive (L2) Swedish-French bilingual children (n = 3), simultaneous (2L1) Swedish-French bilingual children (n = 3) and monolingual French children (n = 3), we examine the development of finite verb forms, object pronouns and subject-verb agreement. A distinction is made between structures that are early/ late in different modes of acquisition and less/more difficult. The operationalization of quantity and quality of input is based on individual input profiles. The results show that AOA affects the development of less difficult and early grammatical structures whereas AOA has no influence on more difficult structures that are acquired late. An effect of input is found in the 2L1 children, and in some of the L2 children. This effect is most clear with more difficult and late structures.

Clause linking in Japhug

This paper presents a detailed description of clause linking in Japhug, based on a corpus of traditional narratives and conversations. It follows the methodology used in Dixon and Aikhenvald’s (2009) collective book on this topic, to ease crosslinguistic comparisons. Although Japhug has a very rich system of converbs, there is not a single meaning that requires a non-finite form: all subtypes of clause linking can be expressed exclusively with finite verb forms, and these indeed predominate in our corpus.

Common Errors in the Use of English Verb Forms

English has been taught as the first foreign language in the schools of Latvia for more than 10 years and is a compulsory subject from the age of nine, but university professors frequently observe that undergraduates who study English make verb errors when both formal and informal register is required. Therefore, the goal of the research was to find the common errors in the use of English finite verb forms and explain their causes. Research participants were first-year students who have studied English for at least ten years at school and now are majoring in language and business studies at a university in Latvia. A case study was used as a research method. Fifty students’ tests on the use of English verb tense, aspect and voice forms were analysed. A questionnaire survey was applied to analyse the potential causes of the verb errors the students make. The analysis allows us to conclude that the most common errors are in the use of the verb aspect forms, followed by the use of the verb tense forms, and that they can be classified as intralingual errors. The most typical causes of these errors are simplifications, the fact that some students have not yet reached the required language level for advanced studies and the use of English, the students’ misconceptions about their real knowledge of verb forms, lack of independent learning habits and also the metalanguage to deal with tertiary level tasks.

The use of verbal morphology in Turkish as a third language: The case of Russian–English–Turkish trilinguals

Aims and Objectives: Several studies suggest that third language acquisition (TLA) is marked with complex patterns of language interaction. However, it is not clear yet to what extent multilinguals activate each of their background languages in TLA, as various factors may trigger the activation of one of the previously learnt languages. This study aims to contribute to the discussion by examining the use of verbal morphology in third language (L3) Turkish of Russian–English–Turkish trilinguals. We investigate whether the use of verbal morphology in L3 Turkish of Russian–English–Turkish trilinguals differs from that of Turkish native speakers and in the case of a deviation, which of the background languages can account for it. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study is done within the framework of cross-linguistic influence. Data and Analysis: The data are collected from eight native speakers of Russian who are highly proficient in their L2 English and L3 Turkish, and use their three languages more or less equally every day. Fictional narratives are employed in the study as the tool for data collection. The use of finite and non-finite verbal forms in Turkish is compared with the baseline data coming from native speakers of Turkish. Findings/Conclusions: The results reveal that the trilingual participants mainly use the verbal morphology consistently with native speakers of Turkish; nonetheless, two deviations from the Turkish baseline stand out: tendency to use finite verbal forms in their noun clauses and inconsistency in the use of temporal-aspectual markers in finite verbal forms. The former can be attributed to the L1 and L2 interlanguage, while the latter can be attributed to the influence of particularly L1 Russian. Originality, and significance/Implications: Thus, the study provides evidence that the source of interference into L3 production is likely to occur due to the cross-linguistic influence from L1, which in turn might imply the predominant position of L1 over sequentially learnt languages at the morphosyntactic level in the language processing.