Imperfective Verbs Research Articles

STATISTICAL DATA ON THE COMPATIBILITY OF THE VERB ‘НАЧАТИ’ IN RUSSIAN СHRONICLES OF THE XIV-XV CENTURIES

This article provides a description of the compatibility features of the verb ‘начати’ in the Old Russian language. The material for this study was electronic transcriptions of the most ancient Russian Chronicles, published on the portal “Manuscript: Slavic Written Heritage”. Within the framework of this work, a quantitative-statistical research method was used, which allows not only to determine the number of occurrences of a particular language unit, but also to statistically substantiate the combinatorial nature of the components with each other. To obtain statistical data on the compatibility of the verb ‘начати, the module of n-grams of the IAS “Manuscript” was used, which makes it possible to identify text combinations with a different number of components and analyze the frequency of functioning of language units in texts. As part of this work, we used the T-score measure, which allows us to determine the most frequent combinations, as well as to identify how non-random the strength of the connection between words in a phrase is. The analysis of statistical data confirms the effectiveness of the use of association measures when working with the Old Russian text. It was revealed that the verb ‘начати’ is most often combined with the infinitive of imperfective verbs. The dictionaries used in the work demonstrate a fairly wide semantics for the verb ‘начати’. In the chronicle text, we recorded the functioning of this unit in only two meanings.

The Effect of Transitivity, Futurity, and Aspectuality on the Translation of English Present Progressive into Arabic Verbal and Active Participle Counterparts

Arabic lacks a specific form for progressive tenses and instead uses the imperfective form ‘jafʕal’ to express habitual and progressive aspects. Arabic also uses an active participle form (AP) to express progressiveness. This paper addresses the effect of transitivity, futurity, and aspectuality on the translation of English present progressive (PP) into Arabic verbal and active participle counterparts. To investigate which of the two forms is used to translate English PP into Arabic, data were collected from 100 students who were studying an elective ‘translation’ course at Princess Sumaya University for Technology (PSUT). The researchers built a questionnaire of 38 English sentences each of which has two main translations: one that uses the imperfective form ‘ja-fʕal’ and another that has an (AP) form, mainly ‘fa:ʕil’ or ‘mu-fʕil’. The participants were asked to rate the acceptability of each sentence on a scale of 0-2. The findings reveal that transitivity and the future reading of the progressive verb affect the translatability of the progressive tenses as imperfective or (AP) form. Transitive verbs are more likely to be translated as imperfective verbs than transitive APs because (AP) does not have as strong verbal properties as lexical verbs. On the other hand, translocative verbs accept (AP) translations fairly enough to refer to future. The findings also reveal that the aspectuality of the verb affects its translation in one of the two main forms mentioned above. (AP) translations of English (PP) become more acceptable when the root of the verb indicates state-of-affair actions, achievements or accomplishments.

Imperfective aspect underspecified for number: Evidence from an eye-tracking during reading experiment

Abstract In an eye-tracking during reading experiment we investigated the processing of ambiguous Polish imperfective verbs in contexts with disambiguating (‘frequently’ and ‘yesterday’) and neutral preceding adverbs. Grammatical number of NP objects was also manipulated. Verb regions received significantly longer regression path times when following a neutral compared to 'yesterday' contexts. This implies that in neutral contexts both senses of polysemous imperfective verbs are activated on the verbal region. Post-hoc analyses revealed more regressions from singular objects in neutral contexts, suggesting that a preference for a more frequent plural event sense was created before the first fixations on the object were made. Finally, we observed an effect consisting of longer first pass times on singular objects and more regressions from the following region in contexts with ‘frequently’, which is consistent with the view that imperfective aspect is underspecified for number. This pattern of results is compatible with Relevance Theory, which posits that the selection of one sense (single ongoing or plural) is an outcome of an inferential process based on frequency, context and world knowledge. However, the fact that sense frequency plays a role in this process indicates that it serves as input to context-based inferential processes suggesting that this information is pre-stored in the memory.

Intensiwa typu orobić się w gwarze jednej wsi małopolskiej

INTENSIVES OF THE TYPE OROBIĆ SIĘ IN THE LOCAL DIALECT OF A LESSER POLAND VILLAGE The subject of the article includes dialectal verb formations with the prefix o- expressing the intensity of action, e.g. ochodzić się – `spend a long lime wandering’, orobić się – `slave away, work hard’, oszukać się – `look for a long time’. The analysis focused on several dozen selected derivatives functioning in the dialect of a village in Lesser Poland. Verbs with the structure o- + verb + się are very productive word-formation types in the dialect under study, as they can be formed from most imperfective verbs. The discussion takes into account the formal, semantic and functional aspects of the described verb formations.

A benchmark for evaluating Arabic word embedding models

AbstractModelling the distributional semantics of such a morphologically rich language as Arabic needs to take into account its introflexive, fusional, and inflectional nature attributes that make up its combinatorial sequences and substitutional paradigms. To evaluate such word distributional models, the benchmarks that have been used thus far in Arabic have mimicked those in English. This paper reports on a benchmark that we designed to reflect linguistic patterns in both Contemporary Arabic and Classical Arabic, the first being a cover term for written and spoken Modern Standard Arabic, while the second for pre-modern Arabic. The analogy items we included in this benchmark are chosen in a transparent manner such that they would capture the major features of nouns and verbs; derivational and inflectional morphology; high-, middle-, and low-frequency patterns and lexical items; and morphosemantic, morphosyntactic, and semantic dimensions of the language. All categories included in this benchmark are carefully selected to ensure proper representation of the language. The benchmark consists of 45 roots of the trilateral, all-consonantal, and semivowel-inclusive types; six morphosemantic patterns (’af‘ala; ifta‘ala; infa‘ala; istaf‘ala; tafa‘‘ala; and tafā‘ala); five derivations (the verbal noun, active participle, and the contrasts in Masculine-Feminine; Feminine-Singular-Plural; Masculine-Singular-Plural); and morphosyntactic transformations (perfect and imperfect verbs conjugated for all pronouns); and lexical semantics (synonyms, antonyms, and hyponyms of nouns, verbs, and adjectives), as well as capital cities and currencies. All categories include an equal proportion of high-, medium-, and low-frequency items. For the purpose of validating the proposed benchmark, we developed a set of embedding models from different textual sources. Then, we tested them intrinsically using the proposed benchmark and extrinsically using two natural language processing tasks: Arabic Named Entity Recognition and Text Classification. The evaluation leads to the conclusion that the proposed benchmark is truly reflective of this morphologically rich language and discriminatory of word embeddings.

러시아어 중간문의 의미와 범위에 관한 연구 : 조력적 중간문을 중심으로

Middle voice is a construction that is difficult to define from the viewpoint of the voice as a dual system with passive and active constructions. Middle constructions are classified into several detailed semantic types. Among them, facilitative middles are the subject of this study. Facilitative middles in Russian mainly present the degree to which the object of the underlying transitive verb (promoted to the position of syntactic subject) is likely to be put into action. Therefore, the facilitative middles consist of a subject (the object of the underlying transitive verb), a present tense form of a reflexive verb derived from an imperfective transitive verb, and generic agent that is not explicitly expressed. In addition, many middle constructions combine with adverbial phrases of manner that indicate how an action is carried out.BR This study examines the semantic and structural properties of facilitative middles in Russian, focusing on subject, verb, agent, and adverbial phrases, and analyzes the attributes of Russian facilitative middles through comparison with related constructions. The findings and conclusions are as follows.BR First, the typical attributive meaning of facilitative middles is derived from the specific tense aspect form of the verb, namely the present imperfective verb form. Thus, when the verb tense is changed to the past, the possibility and potential of the action is weakened and when the aspect of the verb is changed to the perfective, the genericity and conventionality of the action disappear, consequently shifting to the interpretation of anticausative constructions.BR Second, while generic agents cannot be specified and are only implied, non-generic agents can be specified through the “у” prepositional phrase. However, in this case, the cause of and responsibility for the action performed can be ascribed to the agent expressed through the prepositional phrase, not the subject; hence, the sentence obtains an interpretation similar to the passive.BR Third, facilitative middles have modal meanings of potential and possibility in the sense that the object is likely to be subjected to an action. In particular, facilitative middles combine with various adverbial phrases with manner meanings.BR Finally, there are the similar constructions that promote arguments other than the object of the underlying transitive verb as the subject. These are instrument-subject constructions and antipassive. These constructions are formed from a much narrower range of verbs than middle constructions. Therefore, the Russian middles are closely related to the passive, anticausative, antipassive, instrument-subject constructions and generalized personal constructions in accordance with the tense aspect form of verb, the genericity of the agent and the semantic role of the subject, among others.

Consonant-vowel Interactions Inform Paradigm Organization in Egyptian Arabic

This paper presents a quantitative study on vowel alternation in Egyptian Arabic verbs. Specifically, the vowels in perfective verb forms (of the prosodic shape CVCVC) and imperfective verb forms (-CCVC) are hard to predict from each other. This study investigates how probabilistic phonological generalizations involving the root consonants and vowel correspondences help predict the idiosyncratic vowel choice by collecting lexicon statistics and fitting regression models. Following the line of works which has shown that speakers have the ability to internalize statistical patterns into their phonological grammars (e.g., Zuraw 2000, Ernestus & Baayen 2003), the models were used as a means to investigate organization of the perfective-imperfective paradigm. Moreover, by showing that consonant and vowel information play distinct roles in paradigm predictability, this study provides evidence for lexical representations that separate consonants and vowels in Semitic languages (e.g., McCarthy 1979).

ТИПОЛОГІЧНО СПІЛЬНІ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ МОДАЛЬНОСТІ В ДОКУМЕНТАЦІЇ МОРСЬКОЇ ТЕМАТИКИ

This article examines the peculiarities of modal-emotional connotations used in English-language texts in maritime documents, the functional and semantic characteristics of subjective modality units (epistemic, axiological, aletic and deontic) are studied. The results of the research based on the material of maritime-related documents showed that despite the fact that the main distinctive characteristics of the documents include the presence of factual (cognitive) information, the monosemantics of the used terms and distinct content of the text, the author’s personal attitude to the researched problem, his individual characteristics of speech and personality often appear in the texts of the documents. Moreover, the emotional and modal characteristics of the analyzed texts, their orientation, do not in any way interfere with the cognitive semantics of the text. Despite the fact that modal values are subject to the pragmatic task of the work, the goal, which is dedicated to one topic, and the clear structure of presenting the research results, the functional and semantic side of documentary texts is formed not only at the expense of the objective component, but at the expence of the subjective one too. That is why syntactic (parallel constructions emphatic word order, constructions with interjections and with the meaning of intellectual assessment) and morphological (perfect / imperfect verb forms), stylistic (epithets, comparisons) are widely used alongside with lexical means of expression. Some features of the content structure of the work are related to national or cultural peculiarities. An absolutely isomorphic feature of the compared scientific works is that the methods, techniques and manner of language communication is closely connected with the features of the person’s speech, his professional style and his individuality. Explicit presentation of modal meanings strengthens the emphasis on the importance of the introduced information

The Formation of Perfect, Imperfect, Imperative, of Indonesian and Arabic Verbs: A Contrastive Analysis

Arabic and Indonesian have different constructions in the formation of the verb tenses. The purpose of this study is to describe the process of formation of tense verbs in Arabic and Indonesian, to analyze the differences in the formation of tenses between the two languages. The method used in this research is qualitative with contrastive analysis. The results of this study describe the formation of Arabic tense verbs through internal modification and affixation, while the formation of Indonesian verbs is realized lexically. The difference between the two is that the formation of verbs in Arabic is always related to time, quantity, and gender differences, are expressed grammatically through verbs changes, while the formation of verbs in Indonesian is not related to time, and gender thus expressing the semantic concepts of time, quantity, and gender are lexically represented by accompanying verbs to form verb phrases without changing their verb forms.

Differences between Russian and Czech in the Use of Aspect in Narrative Discourse and Factual Contexts

The aims of the paper are twofold. First, it provides a systematic qualitative corpus study into differences between Russian and Czech in the use of aspect in chains of single, episodic events, as well as in habitual contexts, which takes into account the role of verb class, aspectual affixes, discourse relations, and other factors contributing to the overall aspectual interpretation in a given sentence. The findings suggest that while Russian makes narrative progression and habituality visible already on the verb forms, by employing exclusively perfective and imperfective verb forms, respectively, Czech relies more heavily on the context itself and uses (im)perfective verb forms mostly to signal duration vs. change of state. The second part of the paper addresses differences in aspect use between the two languages in so-called general-factual contexts (presuppositional and existential). Against the background of the empirical findings of the corpus study, I argue against the received view that Czech makes use of imperfective verb forms to mark existential readings. The presuppositional reading of imperfective forms, which I assume to be related to the process/durative reading of imperfectives, is argued to exist in both languages.

الخصائص الدلالية والأسلوبية لمظهر الفعل في اللغة الروسية

هذه الدراسة مكرسة للخصائص الوظيفية والدلالية المعقدة للفئات اللفظية من التوتر والنوع في اللغة الروسية سيتم الكشف في هذه الدراسة عن السمات الدلالية والأسلوبية للفرق بين الأفعال المكتملة وغير المكتملة، قد تكون الاختلافات مرتبطة بخصائص المعاني المعجمية للكلمات، وكذلك معاني اللواحق المكونة للكلمات) السوابق واللواحق). يعكس استخدام هذه الفئة النحوية في أنماط مختلفة بوضوح تفاصيل كل منها، لأن درجة واقعية الكلام أو طبيعته المجردة المعممة تظهر بشكل طبيعي في غالبية الأفعال من نوع أو آخر.

The Correlation of Verbal Aspect with Prefixation in Russian

This work is intended as a contribution to further research into the relationship between verbal aspect and prefixation in contemporary Russian. Chapter 1. is dedicated to introducing some basic issues related to aspect usage. Ways of verifying prefixal aspect correlations and checking them are discussed in Chapter 2.1. and 2.2. shown. First, as the phenomenon of syntactic synonyms of phases (2.1.), the forms of aspects of a verb are described as synonyms in certain syntactic situations. In contextual use of aspects (2.2.), the following phenomena were considered: an imperfective verb subordinate to the phase verb, a perfective verb subordinate to a certain modal verb ( удаться , успеть ), Combinations with adverbial phrase words that combine only with the perfective aspect form or the imperfective aspect form, etc. On the other hand, in situation-dependent us of an aspect (2.2.4.), the use of aspects to express various non-linguistic situations in the same context was analyzed. The use of aspect forms in Russian is very closely related to the category of syntax. In this regard, the syntactic and contextual conditions for the functioning of the perfective aspect and imperfective aspect were considered and the compatibility of the word with a certain type of infinitive was analyzed.

Perception of Prosodic and Aspectual Cues to Politeness in Teacher Directives in L1 and L2 Russian

Background: Several studies in interlanguage pragmatics have reported Russian directive speech acts to take a particular position within the dimensions of linguistic politeness and (in)directness, when compared to some Germanic and Romance languages extensively studied in this framework.Purpose of the study: The present paper aimed to investigate the role of language specific cues to politeness in Russian requests by examining their perception by native speakers and L2 learners in a scenario of teacher-student interaction.Methods: An experiment was conducted in which L1 and L2 groups rated the politeness of teacher directives in Russian on a discrete 7-point scale. Three variables were controlled for in the experimental design: the directness of the speech act (manifested in the choice between an imperative or an interrogative construction), verbal aspect, and the type of nuclear pitch accent.Findings: The obtained data generally corroborate existing studies, demonstrating that both native Russian speakers and learners of Russian with Chinese L1 do not judge as impolite direct imperative strategies employed in teacher requests. Though both groups of participants similarly relied on intonational cues in their judgements, the L2 learners did not perform target-like in evaluating the pragmatics of verbal aspect. Within the native group, the usage of imperfective verbs both in direct and conventionally indirect constructions was perceived as a highly salient indicator of impoliteness. Conversely, the size of this effect in L2 judgements did not reach a significance level, implying that this language specific cue is not acquired through incidental learning at pre-intermediate or intermediate proficiency levels.Conclusions: Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of explicit pragmatic instruction even for students who have sufficient experience studying abroad; furthermore, they outline new directions for empirical studies in Russian from the perspective of interlanguage pragmatics.

Irrealis, aspect, and unanchoring in Slavonic and beyond

Summary In this article a parallel is drawn between certain functions of irrealis and imperfective in evaluating contexts in Russian and Polish. The functions of irrealis in complementation are twofold: while in propositional complements it reflects irreality, in state-of-affairs complements it reflects temporal and situational unanchoring. This unanchoring function manifests itself also in complements of evaluative (commentative) predicates, where it extracts an event from its situational setting for the purpose of evaluating its intrinsic properties – intrinsic likelihood or desirability. It is argued that the representation of event tokens as event types by means of imperfective verbs in Slavonic performs a similar unanchoring function in evaluative contexts. The data of Slavonic languages, where both unanchoring devices cooccur, enable a coherent explanation of certain hitherto not fully understood phenomena in the domains of mood and aspect and shed a new light on the long-standing problem of the Romance so-called “factive” subjunctive.

Fine-grained time course of verb aspect processing.

Sentence processing is known to be highly incremental. Speakers make incremental commitments as the sentence unfolds, dynamically updating their representations based on the smallest pieces of information from the incoming speech stream. Less is known about linguistic processing on the sub-word level, especially with regard to abstract grammatical information. This study employs the Visual World Paradigm to investigate the processing of grammatical aspect by Russian-speaking adults (n = 124). Aspectual information is encoded relatively early within the Russian verb which makes this an ideal testing ground to investigate the incrementality of grammatical processing on the sub-word level. Participants showed preference for pictures of ongoing events when they heard sentences involving Imperfective verbs, and for pictures of completed events when they heard sentences involving Perfective verbs. Crucially, the analysis of the participants’ eye-movements showed that they exhibited preference for the target picture already before they heard the end of the verb. Moreover, the latency of this effect depended on where the aspectual information was encoded within the verb. These results indicate that the processing and integration of grammatical aspect information can happen rapidly and incrementally on a fine-grained word-internal level. Methodologically, the study draws together a set of analytical techniques which can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of effect latencies in a wide range of studies within the Visual World eye-tracking paradigm.

The Acquisition of Verbs by Amharic Speaking Children

The study describes the acquisition of verb by typically developing Amharic-speaking children. It recruitedcross-sectional research design to gather the speeches’ data from thirty-two children using picture description, spontaneous elicitation, and story-tellingtasks. Thedata were audio- recorded, transcribed using IPA, and analyzed. The result showed that most ofAmharic speakingchildren’s verbs appeared as single utterances. Verbs such as progressive, pastand imperfective were predominantly frequent in such a way; especially past and imperfective verbs appeared potentially meaningful simple sentence without overt subject and object.Similarly, auxiliary verbs, as a linking or helping verb, they had a consistent occurrence and most of the childrensimple SOVsentences were guided by auxiliaries. Moreover, the perfective, imperatives, and gerund verbs had a significant representation. However, passives were the least and they were not even detected in some children’s speeches. The result alsoconfirmed, that progressive, past and auxiliary verbs had a leading place followed by imperfective. Children also varied in their choice of verbs while describing things, expressing ideas, and narrating events. Some children used a certain verbs monotonously but others weremore selective andstraightforward to the point. In this regard, olderage (4;5and 5;0years) girls had better performance. The distribution of verbs, in type and frequency also portrayed that how some verbs more salient than others. In sum, the progressive and past verbs were likely acquired earlier than others. However, verbs like passives seemingly need time. This implies that the order of verb acquisition differs cross linguistically due to the nature of derivational and inflectional morphology that children are able to acquire first.

Sentences which contain temporal clauses in the vernacular of the Prizren Podgor

This paper analyzes sentences which contain temporal clauses, used in the Prizren-South Morava vernacular of the Prizren Podgor, a group of 17 settlements in the southern uplands of the Metohija basin. A distinctive feature of temporal clauses in this vernacular are the following conjunctions and compound conjunctions: k?d, dok / dokl?e(n) / dokl?e(n) god, cim, kako / ka, a, otk?d; pred da, pred sto, sal sto / samo sto. It turned out that the conjunction k?d has the widest range of meanings in temporal clauses due to its semantic unmarkedness, because other conjunctions (compound conjunctions included) are semantically marked. The conjunctions posto, nakon sto, tek sto, pre nego/no sto, pre nego da and otkako are not attested. Temporal clauses are pre-positioned in the majority of the attested examples. Semantic variation of sentences containing temporal clauses were considered in terms of the conjunctions and compound conjunctions used in them. The corpus shows that constructions without optional negation dominate in the sentences with the imperfect verb in the main clause and perfect verb in the temporal clause, while there are few attested examples with negation, which removes the Podgor vernacular from the modern use of the language. This feature makes the Podgor vernacular part of a bigger balkanized Balkan-Slavic area. The absence of negation testifies that semantics prevailed over grammar, which Balkan-wise stabilizes a simpler model in which negation is omitted, which in fact does not negate the predication of the temporal clause.

The Prosody of Ø-Suffixed Deverbal Nouns in Ukrainian

Ukrainian Ø-suffixed deverbal nouns such as perépyt 'repeated inquiry' are derived from perfective and/or imperfective verbs (< perepytátyPFV 'to ask again, re-interrogate', perepýtuvatyIPFV 'to ask repeatedly'). In some nouns, a complete match in segments and prosody between a base and the derivative is found in the infinitival stem of either or both aspects, as in nadríz 'cut, incision', nadrízatyPFV, nadrízuvatyIPFV 'to make a slight cut'. For other nouns, a segmental match is found in the infinitival stem, but another verb form would be needed to provide the prosodic match, as in rozrýv 'rupture, break', rozryvátyIPFV, rozirvátyPFV 'to tear, rend, break apart', with a stress match only in rozrývanyjPPP. But for many nouns with stress on the prefix, as in perépyt, there simply is no derivational base available for a prosodic match. The proposal is that stress on the prefix in deverbal nouns is a morphosemantic innovation in Ukrainian motivated by hypostasis, i.e., the process of a noun becoming more concrete, designating a result or product of the action rather than nominalizing the action itself (Townsend 1980). The derivation of deverbal nouns can be seen as a stem-level process subject to a grammar with some version of Base-Derivative faithfulness (Stress Faith >> Stress Prefix). But in hypostatic masculine deverbal nouns, the prosodic adjustment takes place on words and here stress is (re)assigned to the prefix by Stress Prefix >> Stress Faith. Ukrainian thus presents a notable case of prosodically marked semantic change.

The use of the Jussive Articles (لم-lam, لما- lamma, لا الناهية- prohibition la, and لام الامر- imperative L prefix) In the Holy Quran and Their Realization in English

This work tackles the use of the first group of the jussive articles (لم-lam, لما- lamma, لا الناهية- prohibition la, and لام الامر- imperative L prefix) in the Holy Quran and their realization in English by consulting the opinion of four translators.&#x0D; Each Ayah is used to show the effect of a single article on the imperfect verb after it. This effect differs from one verb into another according to the type of this imperfect verb; The “Quiescence” (السكون) if the verb ends with a consonant, the elimination of the end vowel if the verb ends with a vowel and the elimination of N (حذف النون) if the verb is among the Arabic five verbs (الافعال الخمسة).&#x0D; Each Ayah is analyzed in certain steps: the translation of four translators, the exeges of the certain Ayah, a grammatical analysis according to the opinion of the Arabic grammarians, and an analysis of the four translations adopted in relation to jussive.

The Readability Level of Arabic Textbook “Silsilah Fī Ta’līm al-Lughah al-‘Arabiyyah”

The purpose of this study was to know the readability level of textbook "Silsilah Fī Ta’līm al-Lughah al-‘Arabiyyah: Al-Mustawā Ats-Tsāniy, Al-Qirā`ah", and factors affecting readability level in terms of word class tendencies and linguistic findings. This study also analyzed the level of reading ability of first-semester Arabic students at Universitas Negeri Jakarta and the types of texts recommended for use or further development by other researchers. This research was carried out using descriptive qualitative methods, and data were collected from 83 students who enrolled in the Qirā`ah course. Readability analysis techniques using the Cloze Procedure Test. The research showed that the readability of textbooks was 46% at the frustration level and 29% at the moderate level. The tendency of the word class to make errors generally occur in 1) 27% of perfect verbs, 2) 24% of nouns, 3) 16% of imperfect verbs. Other factors are 1) Reader Factor: about 43% of students in the Arabic Language Education Department come from general/vocational high schools, 35% from Islamic high school, and only 22% from Islamic boarding schools; 2) Reading Factor: the textbooks writers from native Arabic speakers generally rely on their experience and culture in presenting the text regardless of readers ability as foreign speakers. 3) Book Factor: this book lacks vocabulary and illustrations in the form of pictures, so that it was less helpful in independent understanding.