Internal Temporal Structure Research Articles

Psych verbs in Japanese: Inchoativity and boundary types

Psych(ological) verbs pose a problem to theories about argument realization that assume a uniform and universal mapping between semantic relations and syntactic configurations. A number of attempts try to explain variation in argument structure in terms of the aspectual differences, assuming that the argument realization of a predicate is a reflection of the temporal properties of the predicate to some extent. However, it is challenging to classify psych verbs into any of Vendler’s four aspectual classes because of the “inchoativity” of these verbs. In this study, we take the notion of 'boundary' and its different types as relevant semantic components to describe the internal temporal structure of predicates. We demonstrate that Japanese psych verbs are not aspectually homogeneous but include different types of inchoatives. Accordingly, we propose that the argument realizations of psych verbs can be ascribed to the types of the ‘boundary’ (i.e. left boundary, right = left boundary and its explicitness/implicitness) the predicates denote.

Looking within events: Examining internal temporal structure with local relative rate

This paper describes a method for quantifying temporally local variation in the relative rates of speech signals, based on warping curves obtained from dynamic time warping. Although the use of dynamic time warping for signal alignment is well established in speech science, its use to estimate local rate variation is quite rare. Here we introduce an extension of the local relative rate method that supports the quantification of variability in local relative rate, both within and across a set of events. We show how measures of temporal variation derived from this analysis method can be used to characterize the internal temporal structure of events. In order to achieve this, we first provide an overview of the standard dynamic time warping algorithm. We then introduce the local relative rate measure and describe our extensions, applying them to an articulatory and acoustic dataset of consonant-vowel-consonant syllable productions.

Universal Categories, Single Language Realisations: Aspectuality in French and other Romance Languages

Aspect and Aktionsart are both categories that codify information on the internal temporal structure of states of affairs. In traditional studies on aspectuality, a very strict distinction between them is usually made. Aspect is an obligatory grammatical (morphosyntactic) verbal category, which must therefore be expressed in all languages whose verbal systems allow it. Aktionsart is a lexical verbal category and is not subject to such restraints in individual languages. This “bidimensional” perspective – widespread in Linguistics and even more so in Romance Linguistics (see, among many others, Bertinetto 1986; Smith 1991; Squartini 1998) – contrasts with a less common “unidimensional” approach (De Miguel 1999; Verkuyl 1972, 1993). The latter advocates the semantic identity of what, in terms of the linguistic analysis of individual languages, is considered either grammatical or lexical aspect.In this paper, an analysis of aspectuality as a semantic-functional category comprising both aspect and Aktionsart will be introduced by means of a new unidimensional model, which has an onomasiological background and is based on frame semantics (see Dessì Schmid 2014, 2019). In accordance with many studies on cognitive semantics, aspectuality is defined as the structuring of states of affairs through delimitation or bounding (see, e.g., Smith 1997; Bickel 1997; Langacker 1987, 2006; Talmy 1996, 2000); this delimitation principle is further developed and applied in a highly extended and structured way.The paper will focus on French examples but will also consider some data from other Romance languages, although it is applicable to any individual language.

Internal Temporal Structure of the Biblical Hebrew Verb: A Case Study of Lexical Aspect in the Verb yd'

Traditional Biblical Hebrew (BH) grammars have often defined the temporal information of BH verbs only in terms of tense or grammatical aspect, which can be identified by the finite verbal forms. This paper argues that lexical aspect, which is also known as situation aspect or Aktionsart, is an essential semantic factor for determining the internal temporal structure of BH predicates. As a trial cut, this paper analyses lexical aspect in the verb yd' in the qatal, qotel, and wayyiqtol forms.

On Scalarity in the Verbal Domain. The Case of Polish Psych Verbs. Part 1: Polish Perfective Psych Verbs and Their Prefixes

Polish perfective psych verbs are generally analyzed as inceptive predicates focusing the beginning of an emotional state holding of an experiencer. However, a perfective psych verb can also denote an event of gradual scalar change. In this paper, I argue that on the inceptive reading a perfective psych predicate denotes a transition from a state in which p does not hold to a state in which p holds of an experiencer. In events of gradual change, there is an increase in the degree on the scale of intensity of a given psych state or on the (abstract) extent scale contributed by a verb’s argument. As the internal temporal structure of the events denoted by perfective psych predicates can depend on elements of syntactic context outside the verb, the domain of aspectual composition in Polish is not the verb, pace Rothstein (2020), but VoiceP/vP.

Asymmetric Damage Avalanche Shape in Quasibrittle Materials and Subavalanche (Aftershock) Clusters.

Crackling dynamics is characterized by a release of incoming energy through intermittent avalanches. The shape, i.e., the internal temporal structure of these avalanches, gives insightful information about the physical processes involved. It was experimentally shown recently that progressive damage toward compressive failure of quasibrittle materials can be mapped onto the universality class of interface depinning when considering scaling relationships between the global characteristics of the microcracking avalanches. Here we show, for three concrete materials and from a detailed analysis of the acoustic emission waveforms generated by microcracking events, that the shape of these damage avalanches is strongly asymmetric, characterized by a very slow decay. This remarkable asymmetry, at odds with mean-field depinning predictions, could be explained, in these quasibrittle materials, by retardation effects induced by enhanced viscoelastic processes within a fracture process zone generated by the damage avalanche as it progresses. It is associated with clusters of subavalanches, or aftershocks, within the main avalanche.

Midpoints, endpoints and the cognitive structure of events

ABSTRACT Events unfold over time, i.e. they have a beginning and endpoint. Previous studies have illustrated the importance of endpoints for event perception and memory. However, this work has only discussed events with a self-evident endpoint, and the internal temporal structure of events has not received much attention. In this study, we hypothesise that event cognition computes boundedness, an abstract feature of the internal temporal structure of events. We further hypothesise that sensitivity to boundedness affects how individual temporal slices of events (such as event midpoints or endpoints) are processed and integrated into a coherent event representation. The results of three experiments confirm these hypotheses. In Experiment 1, viewers identified the class of bounded (non-homogeneous, culminating) and unbounded (homogeneous, non-culminating) events in a categorisation task. In Experiments 2 and 3, viewers reacted differently to temporal disruptions in bounded versus unbounded events. We conclude that boundedness shapes how events are temporally processed.

Pupil Diameter Tracks Statistical Structure in the Environment to Increase Visual Sensitivity.

Pupil diameter determines how much light hits the retina and, thus, how much information is available for visual processing. This is regulated by a brainstem reflex pathway. Here, we investigate whether this pathway is under the control of internal models about the environment. This would allow adjusting pupil dynamics to environmental statistics to augment information transmission. We present image sequences containing internal temporal structure to humans of either sex and male macaque monkeys. We then measure whether the pupil tracks this temporal structure not only at the rate of luminance variations, but also at the rate of statistics not available from luminance information alone. We find entrainment to environmental statistics in both species. This entrainment directly affects visual processing by increasing sensitivity at the environmentally relevant temporal frequency. Thus, pupil dynamics are matched to the temporal structure of the environment to optimize perception, in line with an active sensing account.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT When light hits the retina, the pupil reflexively constricts. This determines how much light and thus how much information is available for visual processing. We show that the rate at which the pupil constricts and dilates is matched to the temporal structure of our visual environment, although this information is not directly contained in the light variations that usually trigger reflexive pupil constrictions. Adjusting pupil diameter in accordance with environmental regularities optimizes information transmission at ecologically relevant temporal frequencies. We show that this is the case in humans and macaque monkeys, suggesting that the reflex pathways that regulate pupil diameter are under some degree of cognitive control across primate species.

Normal and pathological imaging of the hippocampus in geriatric patients.

The hippocampus is a small internal temporal cerebral structure which plays a primordial role in memory mechanisms. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the preferred method for analysing this structure. In older adults, dementia is the major cause of hippocampal anomalies, particularly atrophic anomalies, however, differential diagnoses involving other specific pathologies should also be recognised in this population. Most acute or recent hippocampal damage is detected based on MRI signal abnormalities. The aim of this article is to provide an iconographic review of normal and pathological hippocampal imaging in older adults with degenerative, infectious, vascular, inflammatory, tumoural, toxic, and metabolic disorders.

Normal and pathological hippocampal imaging in geriatric patients

The hippocampus is a small internal temporal cerebral structure, which plays a primordial role in the mechanisms of memory. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the reference imaging modality for the hippocampal analysis. In older adults, dementia represents the majority of hippocampal diseases, but other specific pathologies must be known in the differential diagnosis. Many hippocampal abnormalities are represented by a loss of substance (atrophy). However, most acute or recent hippocampal damage is detected by MRI signal abnormalities. The aim of this article is to offer a pictorial review of the normal and pathological hippocampal aspects of older adults, during degenerative, infectious, vascular, inflammatory, tumoral, toxic and metabolic disorders.

Semelfactives as atomic predicates

ABSTRACT The goal of this paper is to provide evidence in favour of the hypothesis that, regarding their internal temporal structure, semelfactive and achievement predicates are alike (i.e., both are atomic). In order to do so, I will study the readings these predicates obtain in two different contexts: when they are modified by for-phrases and when they combine with a progressive operator. The conclusion will be that when combined with elements that operate over intervals, semelfactives trigger a special reading (the iterative one), because these elements cannot operate within their internal temporal structure.

Another Dating Revolution for Prehistoric Archaeology?

Transitions to the Howiesons Poort Industry and other early modern human cultural phases have conventionally been explained as direct or indirect responses to major climatic and ecological fluctuations. Advances in optically stimulated luminescence dating have now provided the time resolution necessary to refute these explanations. However, for improvements in dating methods to have a revolutionary impact on the archaeology of early modern human evolution, the correction of these flawed narratives can only be regarded as a first step. What is more important is that the discipline now embraces the opportunity to analyse cultural entities in terms of their internal temporal structure, and hence to realign praxis with contemporary evolutionary theory.

Perirhinal cortex supports acquired fear of auditory objects

Damage to rat perirhinal cortex (PR) profoundly impairs fear conditioning to 22 kHz ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), but has no effect on fear conditioning to continuous tones. The most obvious difference between these two sounds is that continuous tones have no internal temporal structure, whereas USVs consist of strings of discrete calls separated by temporal discontinuities. PR was hypothesized to support the fusion or integration of discontinuous auditory segments into unitary representations or “auditory objects”. This transform was suggested to be necessary for normal fear conditioning to occur. These ideas naturally assume that the effect of PR damage on auditory fear conditioning is not peculiar to 22 kHz USVs. The present study directly tested these ideas by using a different set of continuous and discontinuous auditory cues. Control and PR-damaged rats were fear conditioned to a 53 kHz USV, a 53 kHz continuous tone, or a 53 kHz discontinuous tone. The continuous and discontinuous tones matched the 53 kHz USV in terms of duration, loudness, and principle frequency. The on/off pattern of the discontinuous tone matched the pattern of the individual calls of the 53 kHz USV. The on/off pattern of the 50 kHz USV was very different from the patterns in the 22 kHz USVs that have been comparably examined. Rats with PR damage were profoundly impaired in fear conditioning to both discontinuous cues, but they were unimpaired in conditioning to the continuous cue. The implications of this temporal discontinuity effect are explored in terms of contemporary ideas about PR function.

Plurality and Temporal Modification

A semantics with plural entitles and plural times accounts for cumulative relations between plural arguments and temporal expressions. The semantics equips nominal, verbal and sentential meanings with temporal context variables and treats temporal modifiers as temporal generalized quantifiers; cumulative conjunction, however, takes place at types lower than generalized quantifiers. The mediation of temporal context variables allows cumulative relations to percolate between an argument in a main clause and one in a temporal clause, in apparent violation of locality restrictions. Plural times form a semilattice structure imposed on the set of intervals; no interaction is observed between this and the internal temporal structure of intervals.

Increasing Specificity in Perceptual Development: Infants' Detection of Nested Levels of Multimodal Stimulation

This research assessed the development of infants' sensitivity to two nested amodal temporal relations in audible and visible events. Their detection of global temporal synchrony between visible and audible impacts and internal temporal structure nested within each impact specifying object composition (single versus compound objects) was assessed. Infants of 4, 7, and 11 weeks of age were habituated to a single and a compound object striking a surface and then received test trials depicting a change in synchrony or object composition. Results indicated an interaction between age and condition where sensitivity to synchrony was present by 4 weeks and remained stable across age, whereas sensitivity to composition emerged later, by 7 weeks, and increased dramatically with age. These findings converge with other recent findings to illustrate a pattern of increasing specificity in the development of perception, where infants first detect global and later detect embedded relations. The early sensitivity to global relations may provide an organizational framework for development by focusing infant attention on unitary events, guiding and constraining further exploration, and buffering infants from learning incongruent relations.

Neural timing nets

Formulations of artificial neural networks are directly related to assumptions about neural coding in the brain. Traditional connectionist networks assume channel-based rate coding, while time-delay networks convert temporally-coded inputs into rate-coded outputs. Neural timing nets that operate on time structured input spike trains to produce meaningful time-structured outputs are proposed. Basic computational properties of simple feedforward and recurrent timing nets are outlined and applied to auditory computations. Feed-forward timing nets consist of arrays of coincidence detectors connected via tapped delay lines. These temporal sieves extract common spike patterns in their inputs that can subserve extraction of common fundamental frequencies (periodicity pitch) and common spectrum (timbre). Feedforward timing nets can also be used to separate time-shifted patterns, fusing patterns with similar internal temporal structure and spatially segregating different ones. Simple recurrent timing nets consisting of arrays of delay loops amplify and separate recurring time patterns. Single- and multichannel recurrent timing nets are presented that demonstrate the separation of concurrent, double vowels. Timing nets constitute a new and general neural network strategy for performing temporal computations on neural spike trains: extraction of common periodicities, detection of recurring temporal patterns, and formation and separation of invariant spike patterns that subserve auditory objects.

Basic conjugation of the Mbalanhu verb

In this article the morphology and morphophonology of the basic conjugational categories of the Mbalanhu verb are described. These categories are mood (those inflectionally marked properties of the verb that relate clauses to possible worlds), simple tense (as opposed to compound tense; simple tense is regarded as those inflectional properties of the verb that indicate deixis between coding time and event time), and aspect (those agglutinating properties of the Mbalanhu verb that signal the internal temporal structure of the event described by the verb).

Disambiguation of Segmental Dependencies by Extended Phonetic Context

This research investigated listeners' ability to recognize adjacent vowels and consonants that are conveyed in part by a common temporal cue – vowel duration. The stimuli consisted of a large sample of natural speech containing nonsense syllables made by combining four vowels that differed in inherent duration (/i/, /ε/, /i/, /e/) with two syllable-final consonants that differed in phonological voicing (/z/ and /s/), a distinction that is partially cued by vowel duration. Experiment 1 examined the effect of vowel identity, fricative identity, and contextual factors on vowel duration, voiced-frication duration, and voiceless-frication duration in speech production, and the potential effectiveness of these durational measures as classification cues. In Experiment 2, listeners identified the syllables after they had been excised from sentential context. Accuracy in recognizing /s/ varied with the inherent duration of the preceding vowel, with the number of errors increasing with inherent vowel duration. This suggests that listeners did not sufficiently account for the effect of vowel identity when interpreting vowel duration as a cue to syllable-final voicing. In Experiment 3, listeners heard the syllables in sentential context. Accuracy improved, and no relation was found between inherent vowel duration and accuracy in recognizing /s/. This indicated that the sentential context of a syllable conveys information that is useful to listeners in correctly determining the segmental basis of the internal temporal structure of a syllable.

The Past as Place: Names, Stories, and the Remembered Self

While the treatment of time in, and the temporal structure of, stories from the folk-cultural register have fascinated students of folk-narrative for a long time,5 this fascination has reached a new peak in recent years.6 There is now considerable agreement among scholars, and I subscribe to this view, that the folktale, and by that we mean essentially what in German is usually termed the mdrchen, is in its very nature ahistorical. For this reason, it narrates a past which cannot be accommodated in any identifiable historical, calendar, or clock-on-the-wall time-frame but rather is determined by the folktale's own narrative time. The formulaic introductory phrase 'Once upon a time' (Es war einmal) or one of its recognisable equivalents eases the listener/reader out of the historical time in which the story is being told (narration time) into this narrative time, providing an unmistakable linguistic signal that both the narrator's intentions and the listener's expectations will be markedly different from those involved in, let us say, a historian's chronicling of the past, an official report on a recent occurrence, or even a storyteller's rendering of a local legend. Once convincingly embedded in narrative time, any story's total recounted time is presented in narrated and non-narrated portions, of which the former-the narrated portions-which are roughly equivalent to the episodes of the narrative structure set out in Antti Aarne's and Stith Thompson's Tale Type Index7 are normally proportionately less extensive than the latter-the non-narrated segments-thus giving folktales in their very telling a paradoxical lopsidedness towards silence, towards the redundance of the unsaid. The basic unit of this internal temporal structure is the day, and any further subdivision of its somewhat elastic diurnal frame of reference is dominated by the sundial, not the clock. Whether one agrees with this particular overview of this scheme of things or with the specific terminology through which it is expressed, or not, there is no denying that the relationship between time and the folktale in the actualisation of which believable chunks of the past are created through narration, has been charted in great detail and that its description and analysis have been given noteworthy scholarly attention. Although, naturally, much work still remains to be done in the exploration of this particular facet of folktales, solid foundations have undoubtedly been laid on which a reliable intellectual edifice can be built. Even without further study, therefore, we can with some confidence already answer questions regarding the 'When' of the events which folktales depict.

Tense, mood, aspect: The future in Russian

My purpose in this paper is to examine the interaction of the categories of tense, mood and aspect with regard to one particularly problematic category: the future in Russian. Tense locates an event, action or situation in time in relation to the moment of speech or in relation to an established temporal reference point. Aspect characterizes the internal temporal contour or structure of the event. Aspect here is treated not as just a verbal category, but as a feature of the proposition. Mood must be distinguished from modality. Mood is a morphologically marked category which has a modal function. Modality, in contrast to mood, is a semantic category which covers a broad range of nuances such as desiderative, intentive, hypothetical, potential, necessitative and so on (see Fleischman 1982, 13). The indicative is the unmarked mood which is non-modal in that it is factual and declarative (see Lyons 1968, 307). This distinction between mood and modality is crucial to the present discussion. The future tense has been likened to a mood because it differs