Non-past Tense Research Articles

It Costs To Exist: Acceptability Judgments of the Temporal Concord of the Auxiliary Verbs You and Hui in Taiwan Mandarin.

The mechanisms underlying the processing of the temporal reference of a sentence are still unexplored. Most of the previous psycholinguistic studies used the temporal concord violation between deictic time adverbs and tense marking on the verb to investigate this issue. They found that processing past tense marking is more difficult than non-past tense, indicated by lower accuracy rates and/or longer reaction time. However, it is not clear whether this complexity is due to tense marking or the temporal reference it denotes. This paper examines this issue with a judgment acceptability experiment in Taiwan Mandarin, which is analyzed as a tenseless language. The two modal auxiliary verbs you and hui were placed after deictic past time adverbs (grammatical with you but not with hui) and deictic future time adverbs (grammatical with hui but not with you). The temporal concord violation of the auxiliary verb you led to higher acceptability rates but longer reaction time than hui, reflecting higher processing difficulties. This paper argues that these complexities are due to the existential-assertive meaning of you, which interplays with the meaning of the event described by the verb rendering the situation more or less likely to occur in the future. The computation of the temporal concord of hui, displaying a future sense meaning, is more straightforward and therefore easier to process. This suggests that the mechanisms responsible for temporal reference processing are of different nature depending on the semantics of the temporal marker in the sentence.

Agreement with coordinated subjects containing a personal pronoun: Experimental data from Russian

The article examines Russian predicative agreement with a coordinated subject containing personal pronouns. In cases when the conjuncts have different person features, the choice of person agreement is based on the person hierarchy; it is considered to be an almost universal mechanism. However, the corpus and experimental data presented in this article show that the person hierarchy is not strictly imposed in Russian. We consider the two types of coordinated subjects, mismatched in person: 1) я и Х ‘I and X’ / Х и я ‘X and I’, where X is a masculine proper name, and 2) я и ты ‘I and you’ / ты и я ‘you and me’. Six experiments were conducted using 1–7 Likert scale. The experiments presented sentences with different word order (SV(О) / (О)VS) and conjuncts (I and X / X and I / I and you / you and I). In addition, we included the predicate characteristics as separate factors in the experiments – temporal characteristics, unaccusativity/unergativity. In all experiments, 1st person plural agreement (for non-past tense) and plural agreement (for past tense) were rated most acceptable. Sentences with such agreement are also the most frequent in the collected corpus material. With (O)VS word order, first conjunct agreement also becomes possible. In non-past tense, 3rd person plural agreement is also acknowledged, even in experiments, in which none of the conjuncts bears the 3rd person feature. Examples with such agreement have also been found in the corpus. The acceptability level of possible agreement strategies depends on such factors as word order, conjuncts order, and agreement characteristics of the predicate

К описанию проспективных конструкций в якутском языке

This article describes the semantics of four periphrastic verb constructions in Sakha with prospective-intentional meaning: -aarɪ tur- [-сvb.purp stand-], -aarɪ gɪn- [-сvb.purp do-] with past tense markers, -aarɪ gɪn- [-сvb.purp do-] with non-past tense markers, and -aarɪ sɪrɪt- [-сvb.purp walk-]. The choice of auxiliary verb is partially determined by the verb’s lexical meaning: for example, the verb tur- is used with standing objects (including frost or heat, which can “stand”), gɪn- in non-past tense situa‑ tions where a certain process is observable, and sɪrɪt- with objects that are moving in different directions. The article likewise describes the limitations on the type of situation and participants involved, as well as the collocation of these constructions with various temporal and aspectual adverbs. The latter helps to determine the aspectual profile of the discussed constructions. Finally, the iterative-prospective polysemy of the -aarɪ gɪn- construction is discussed: this construction can be used both to refer to a situation that is about to happen and to a situation that occurs regularly (more often than usual).

Semantic Theory versus Semantic “Lumping”: Reply to Bertinetto et al. (2015) The acquisition of tense and aspect in a morphology-sensitive framework: data from Italian and Austrian-German children

Abstract The crosslinguistic investigation of child language has revealed the frequent co-occurrence of certain values of Aktionsart, aspect and tense. Specifically, dynamic-atelic predicates are likely to be observed with unbounded values of aspect in the non-past tense and dynamic-telic predicates with bounded aspect and past tense morphology. This observation has motivated theories of language acquisition that incorporate the semantic structure of predicates in relation to clause structure. Pier Marco Bertinetto and colleagues have claimed that inferences regarding the role of predicate structure in the acquisition process have been erroneously derived from “lumping” together stative and activity predicates. Furthermore, without acknowledging the prior theory of “typological bootstrapping”, they present their presumably unique theory of information processing to explain their Italian and German child language data. The purpose of this reply is to show that the stative-activity “lumping” assertion is a “straw man” argument, and a theory of morphological information processing is both well-known and compatible with semantically based theories of acquisition.

Finite Verb Forms in Nubri With a Focus on Conjunct-Disjunct Distinction

This paper is a preliminary report on the finite verb forms in Nubri. Nubri reveals the verb agreement pattern known as 'conjunct-disjunct (C-D) like some Tibetan varieties, such as Kyirong Tibetan, Gyalsumdo among others. Nubri shows fairly consistent pattern of the verbs in the past tense marked with -hin, and –soŋ for conjunct and disjunct respectively. However, this is not consistent in the non-past tense.

현대중국어 ‘O是SV的’ 구문의 시제 제약 연구

In the Standard Chinese, there are many sentences that contain multiple meanings while in the same form, such as the ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De(的)’. The noun phrase preceding the ‘Shi(是)’ is the object of the verb and the noun phrase between the ‘Shi(是)’ and the verb is the subject from the meaning perspective. Some scholars have interpreted the ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De(的)’ as ‘Shi(是)…De(的)’ construction, while others interpret it as a type of nominalized sentence. Still others have expounded that the form of ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De (的)’ is a double structure, which can be either the ‘Shi(是)…De(的)’ construction or nominalized sentence based on the context. Furthermore, the ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De(的)’ can either past tense or non-past tense, depending on the context. This study aims to identify under what context the ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De (的)’ can be recognize as either past tense or non-past tense, or recognized in both past and non-past tense. According to the analysis, the first factor of the effect on the tense of ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De(的)’ is the telicity. In case of the telic verbs of achievement and accomplishment situation type, the tense of the sentence is past. The second factor of the effect on the tense of ‘O+Shi (是)+S+V+De(的)’ is the durative property. Among the atelic verbs, the state situation type and the activity situation type with strong durative property, cannot appear in ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De(的)’. The activity situation type with less durative property can appear in ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De(的)’ sentences, and the tense can either be past or non-past depending on the context. The semelfactive situation type, which has no durative property, will only be past tense, should they appear in ‘O+Shi(是)+S+V+De(的)’.

Argument and Adjunct Purpose Constructions in Hill Mari

In this study the author suggests a new systemic model of purpose constructions in Hill Mari - a Finno-Ugric language, spoken by approximately 30 000 people living mostly in Mari El Republic, located in Volga river basin. (Here and thereafter (if the opposite is not stated overtly) the term “purpose clause” or “purpose construction” is used in its traditional wide sense and should not be confused with “Purpose clauses” opposed to “Rationale clauses” in R. A. Faraci’s terms (1974).) There are two core strategies of marking the embedded predicate which can be used in contexts denoting purpose in Hill Mari. Firstly, an imperative form can be used. This option is reserved for different-subjects contexts. Secondly, an embedded predicate can be marked as infinitive. Notably, such a clause allows for its subject to be expressed overtly, in which case it is marked by Dative. Typically, though, the subject of an infinitival purposive clause is omitted and obligatorily controlled by a certain argument of a matrix clause. Finally, there are two peripheral constructions - those of perfect tense and non-past tense. Both are quite marginal and not universally accepted. This study also discusses the interaction between aforementioned strategies and purpose complementizers (conjunctions) š (borrowed from Russian) and. However, what constitutes the main theoretical concern of this study are certain peculiar traits of the subordinate null subject’s behavior. The paper adopts a standard generative approach (within Chomsky’s minimalist program) and argues that Hill Mari purpose constructions can be divided into two groups, namely, argument ones, occupying the position of VP complement, and adjunct ones, which are attached as VP adjuncts. This structural distinction can account for the indirect object control, which is possible in all cases, and direct object control, which is only allowed in case of certain matrix predicates. Such an analysis links Hill Mari purpose construction’s distinction to the Purpose/Rationale clauses distinction proposed for English in R. A. Faraci (1974). Finally, Hill Mari infinitival purpose clauses’ specific traits can potentially provide certain insights for the general theory of ditransitive constructions. Thus, among the main current approaches only that developed by L. Pylkkänen (2008) can account for the facts observed in Hill Mari. L. Pylkkänen argues that in some languages double objects constructions can be derived via “high” applicative head, taking VP as its complement and indirect object as its specifier. Our study argues that this is also likely to be the case in Hill Mari.

Morphological processing influences on dyslexia in Greek-speaking children.

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia in grade 3. The sample consisted of 24 dyslexic children and 32 chronological age-matched typically developing readers. All participants completed two oral experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness (i.e., verb inflections and noun-adjective inflections). The noun-adjective inflection task assessed children's ability to produce the plural of articles, adjectives, and nouns in the context of a sentence. The verb inflection task required children to change the tense of the verb in a sentence. Furthermore, phonological awareness and oral receptive vocabulary were assessed. Greek-speaking children with dyslexia faced difficulties in both inflectional tasks and in receptive vocabulary. They appeared to have greater difficulty in elicitation of non-past tense from past tense. Binary logistic regression targeted at understanding whether dyslexia can be predicted based on phonological and non-phonological oral language skills revealed that phonological awareness had a significant effect on distinguishing dyslexics from typically developing readers. Overall, our findings lead us to suggest that in an alphabetic language with a shallow orthographic system and rich morphology, children with dyslexia appear to have impaired inflectional morphological awareness and impaired vocabulary in comparison to their peers. Moreover, these results suggest the significance of teaching morphological skills in improving reading skills. However, further research is needed to substantiate these findings.

On the inefficiency of negative feedback in Russian morphology L1 acquisition

This study investigates negative feedback effects on inflectional morphology acquisition in Russian. In order to examine the effects of adult feedback on child error elimination and assess the lasting effect of feedback, a series of elicited tasks was conducted with 65 Russian children aged from 3 to 4 years. Twelve verbs which undergo overregularization in the non-past tense resulting from applying the yod /j/-pattern were used as stimuli. The experiment was repeated over four sessions with bi-weekly intervals between sessions 1, 2, 3 and a four-week interval between sessions 3 and 4. Four groups of participants were formed with three types of feedback (Correction, Clarification Question and Repetition), and a control group without feedback. No significant differences were observed between groups with different feedback types, or even without feedback. This finding supports the general hypothesis that negative feedback is not a strong driver of recovery from overregularization errors in verb acquisition.

When (im)perfective is perfect (and when it is not)

The goal of this paper is to discuss some meaning correspondences (and/or clashes) between the perfective/imperfective aspectual contrast in Russian and various interpretations of a perfect in English. While a detailed comparison between perfect and (im)perfective, even in only two specific languages, is a project that clearly extends beyond all imaginable page limits for a single paper, I hope to demonstrate here some tendencies which might facilitate further (and deeper) theoretical and empirical studies of these two highly debated grammatical categories. In particular, the paper will show that there is a clear split between perfective and imperfective aspect in the non-past tense with respect to expressing perfect meanings and there is also a split between different existential meanings of the perfect in the sense that some of them correspond to the perfective aspect and some of them are only rendered by the imperfective aspect in Russian. Given this empirical picture, one of the theoretical questions that emerges from this study is what kind of repercussions the observed generalizations might have for a (universal) grammatical theory of tense and aspect.

Perspective-Taking in Sentence Comprehension: Time and Empathy

This study examines the neural substrate of perspective-taking by analyzing the electroencephalographic (EEG) activity elicited by the auditory comprehension of sentences for which the comprehender had to adopt the perspective of the person described in them. Recent studies suggest that the ability of perspective-taking can be an integrative function of temporal and spatial information processing. We thus examined the independence and possible interaction of human perspective shifts and temporal perspective-taking by utilizing Japanese subsidiary verbs for giving, namely -ageru and -kureru. We manipulated human perspective shifts and temporal perspective-taking independently in experimental sentences by syntactically changing the subject and the object between the speaker and a third person, while we manipulated the tense to be past or non-past tense via sentence-final particles ru/ta (non-past/past). The EEG analyses via electrodes indicated the suppression of the β band for human perspective shifts in sentences in non-past tense and the absence of such suppression in sentences in past tense. The analyses for the clusters of independent components indicated β suppression for past tense against non-past tense in sentences without a human perspective shift. This response pattern suggests a close relationship between human perspective shifting and temporal perspective-taking. The β suppression for the human perspective shift in our experiment can be understood as a replication of the previous EEG findings observed for perspective-taking in the presentation of visual images. The preceding findings and our result suggest that the ability or the function of perspective-taking is not specific to the modality. Furthermore, the generator of the β suppression for past tense against non-past tense without human perspective shifting was localized in the precuneus, which is consistent with recent findings indicating that the precuneus is deeply involved in time perception.

A Longitudinal Study on the Korean Past Tense Acquisition : Focused on the Interview of L1 Chinese Learners

This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in two Chinese learners of Korean. This paper has been designed to track developmental aspect of past tense form and to verify the Aspect Hypothesis through a longitudinal corpus. It was found that (1) two children use past tense form predominantly with [+telic] (accomplishment/ achievement verbs) than [-telic] (action/ state verbs); (2) in the stage 1 and stage 4, they use past tense form with accomplishment verbs the most; (3) in the stage 2 and stage 3, they use past tense form with achievement verbs the most. The result shows the pattern of the development of tense-aspect form is based on prototype formation (the correlations between verbs with [+telic] and past tense form `-ess-`) partially from non-past tense errors in the past tense obligatory contexts; the pattern in the early development of tense-aspect of Chinese acquisition of Korean have gaps with earlier studies.

The Use of the Effective Vocabulary, Grammar and Function of English by the Biology Teachers

<p>This research investigated vocabulary, grammar and function of English which could work well as a means of conducting: 1) the application of instruction (students’ physical behaviors, giving orders or tasks), 2) the science instruction (imparting theories, the concepts, facts and information) and 3) vocabulary instruction (helping the students understand vocabulary). The research found three kinds of word used by the teachers namely: 1) High Frequency General Words, 2) Non Specialized Academic Words and 3) the Specialized Content Area Words. The category 1) were used for social function to build interpersonal communications, direct the students’ physical behaviors and give the orders or the tasks. The category (2) and (3) were used in the area of academic function specifically to conduct the science instruction (explanations, descriptions, comparisons, assessments, clarifications, paraphrasing, directing instructions, and behaviors). Four sentence patterns (declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory) were used for the application of instruction such as greetings, leave-takings, appreciating the students’ works, directing the students’ behaviors and the students to do the tasks. In the context of science instruction, the declaratives were used for explanations, descriptions, comparisons, clarifications and paraphrasing. Assessing the students’ knowledge and doing the clarifications used interrogative sentences. The imperative sentences were used for directing the instructions and the students’ behaviors. The exclamatory sentences were used to express the teachers’ excitements, admirations or angers. The Noun-Phrase patterns with past-tense and non-past tense and its transformational forms were employed.</p>

The Greek Perfect through Gothic Eyes: Evidence for the Existence of a Unitary Semantic for the Greek Perfect in New Testament Greek

The semantics of the later Koine Greek perfect have been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. For the immediately post-Classical language Haug (2004) has suggested that the perfect combines resultant state and XN semantics, unifiable under the framework of event realisation (Bohnemeyer & Swift 2004). The present article presents a modified unitary semantic in terms of participant property (Smith 1997), and assesses its validity with reference to the translation of the perfect indicative active into Gothic. It is found that, while non-state verbs are translated only with past-tense forms in Gothic, contrary to traditional and even many modern views of the Greek perfect, the perfect of both pure state and change-of-state verbs are compatible with both past and non-past tense readings. The fact that this is the case regardless of the diachronic pedigree of the perfect forms concerned is taken as evidence consistent with the existence of the proposed unitary semantic for the Greek perfect in the New Testament in the eyes of the Gothic translator.

The semantics and pragmatics of composite mood marking: The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia

This paper investigates a system of composite mood marking in the non-PamaNyungan languages of northern Australia, which generally mark modal meanings through combinations of prefixes and suffixes of the finite verb. The analysis focuses on the category of irrealis, which is typically marked with a specific prefix, and covers both meanings of counterfactuality (when combined with a past tense suffix) and of potentiality (when combined with non-past tense suffixes). The central problem in describing this category, as with irrealis categories more generally, is how to reconcile the feature of non-actualization found in the counterfactual uses with the feature of potentiality found in all other uses (including the counterfactual one). On the basis of the formal systematics of prefix-suffix combinations, as well as the internal semantic structure of counterfactual constructions, it is shown that non-actualization can be derived from past potentiality by general Gricean principles. In addition, this analysis suggests that some exceptional non-Pama-Nyungan systems that do not have an irrealis prefix can be diachronically related to the basic system with an irrealis prefix. The analysis proposed has implications for the more general typology of irrealis categories and for their relation with negation.

In Defense of the Russian Infinitive

The overwhelming majority of Russian verbs are regular and represent productive verb types that are signalled by the shape of the infinitive. At the same time, the infinitive by itself is often an inadequate guide to conjugation affiliation. In such cases, one or more forms of the non-past tense have traditionally been provided to resolve the difficulty; often it is the form of the third person plural.' More recently, a single-stem system of analyzing and presenting the Russian verb based upon Jakobson's well-known 1948 article has been promoted by a number of authors. The system's vaunted strength on the practical level is that students have to memorize only one form-the basic stem-for each verb in Russian, from which all other forms of the verb are derived. In the judgment of its proponents, the single-stem stem relieves our students once and for all of the burden of having to deal either with a captious infinitive or with a multi-stem display. Thus far, it appears that no contrastive performance studies have been conducted that would assist instructors in making a more considered choice between the single-stem and traditional approaches. In an effort to provide additional perspective on the issue, the present writer examined the 1000 most frequently used Russian verbs as determined by standard frequency counts in order to determine how unreliable the Russian infinitive really is. For the study, all verbs in -aTb/-RTb were assumed to conjugate