Past Markers Research Articles

Parametric Variation on Missing Tenses in Temporal Adjuncts

The past tense markers cannot appear in the temporal adjuncts of Korean, while they can in those of English. This fact is surprising since it has been argued in the literatures that the so called SOT rule, which deletes past tense at LF, applies to English but not to Korean. I argue in the paper that, interestingly, the missing Tense variation in temporal adjuncts can be captured exactly by the solution for the SOT variation, i.e., Stowell’s (2005) claim that English morphological past ?ed is a non-local PAST polarity item (PPI) but Japanese one (and Korean ?ess, too, I claim) is a local PPI. The true semantic PAST tense, as a polarity licenser for a morphological past, cannot occur within the temporal adjuncts since its PRO reference time argument cannot be controlled due to the intervening temporal argument. This leads to the result that local PPIs, which need to be licensed by the true semantic PAST within temporal adjuncts, cannot appear in temporal adjuncts. On the other hand, non-local PPIs can appear in temporal adjuncts since they can be licensed by the true semantic PAST outside the temporal adjuncts.

V1-le vs. RVC-le in expressing resultant state in learners’ Mandarin interlanguage: evidence of two states of mind?

V1-le vs. RVC-le in expressing resultant state in learners’ Mandarin interlanguage: evidence of two states of mind?

Fake Tense in conditional sentences: a modal approach

Many languages allow for “fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker: can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou (Linguist Inq 31(2):231–270, 2000) has dubbed this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional constructions. This paper analyzes Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can mark the presence of a temporal operator, but it can also signal a specific modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the generative semantics framework (Heim and Kratzer, Semantics in generative grammar, 1998), using the restrictor approach to conditionals (Kratzer, in: R. Bauerle et al. (eds.) Semantics from different points of view, 1979; in: A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich (eds.) Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, 1991), and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English tense system (von Stechow, in: W. Klein (ed.) The expression of time in language, 2010; Romero and von Stechow, Tense: introduction, 2008).

Zero verb marking in Sranan

In the Surinamese creole language Sranan, verbs in finite clauses that lack overt TMA-marking are often considered to be ambiguous between past and present interpretations (depending on the lexical aspect of the verb involved) or analyzed as having a perfective value. We claim that these verbs are in fact zero-marked, and we investigate the various uses of this zero expression in relation to context and lexical aspect on the basis of corpus data and native speaker elicitations. It is shown that existing analyses do not cover and unify all the various uses of the construction. We propose, as an alternative, to regard the zero form as present perfective marker, whereby tense and aspect are conceived of as fundamentally epistemic categories, in line with Langacker (1991). This combination of present tense and perfective aspect, which is regarded as infelicitous in typological studies of tense and aspect (cf. the ‘present perfective paradox’, Malchukov 2009), gives rise to the various interpretations associated with zero. However, in all of its uses, zero still indicates that, at the most basic level, a situation belongs to the speaker’s conception of ‘immediate reality’ (her domain of ‘inclusion’). This basic ‘presentness’ distinguishes zero from the past-tense marker ben, which implies dissociation.

An Important Problem in Teaching Turkish as a Second Language: -mXş Indirectivity Marker

Abstract “-mXs” morpheme (suffix) has been used as the “learned past tense” as a past tense coder in traditional grammar works. However, the main function of this suffix is not to indicate time. In the course books that are published both in Turkey and abroad, this suffix is referred to as “narrative modal”, “heard past tense” or “past tense with –mis”. In these materials, one gets the assumption that the primary function of this suffix is to indicate past tense. As an international language category, indirectivity has been expressed in different syntactic structures or with different coders according to the typology of the language. As a subgroup of evidential modal, the indirectivity has been marked with “–mXs” morpheme together with other modal indications. In Turkish “–DX” is the past tense marker morpheme. However, in the books given to the Erasmus Intensive Language Program students who are studying in Turkey, -mXs is also given as a past tense marker which is lmeading to many mistakes. The main aim of this study is to identify the functions of this morpheme and propose suggestions to clarify the issues about its usage.

Nyikina paradigms and refunctionalization

Here I present a case study of change in the complex verb morphology of the Nyikina language of Northwestern Australia. I describe changes which lead to reanalysis of underlying forms while preserving much of the inherited phonological material. The changes presented here do not fit into previous typologies of morphological change. Nyikina lost the distinction between past and present, and in doing so, merged two paradigms into one. The former past tense marker came to be associated with intransitive verb stems. The inflected verbs thus continue inherited material, but in a different function. These changes are most parsimoniously described in a theory of word formation which makes reference to paradigms.

ASPECT in Japanese Children with SLI

In English, ASPECT has been reported to be a difficult construction for children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) to acquire. However, there have been few reports concerning the acquisition of ASPECT in Japanese. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Japanese children with SLI would experience difficulty with the construction of ASPECT. The participants were Japanese siblings with SLI; a female junior high school student (Child A) and a male elementary school student (Child B). Utterances in spontaneous speech and the results of an elicited production task were analyzed. In the elicited production task, the data of 16 elementary school students with typical language development were also examined. The results were as follows. In spontaneous speech, the percent correct of Child A and Child B with the use of ASPECT was 100% and 94.4%, respectively. However, the percent correct on the elicited production task was 50.0% and 77.5%, whereas it was 95.9% with the 16 typically developing children. Furthermore, we found peculiar errors in which Child A and Child B used past-tense markers where expressions of ASPECT were required in sentences including adverbial expressions indicating past tense. In contrast, this type of error was not observed at all with the typically developing children. These results suggest that, although Japanese children with SLI produced few errors of ASPECT in spontaneous speech, they have difficulty acquiring ASPECT and use compensatory strategies to compensate for their inability to manipulate constructions of ASPECT.

Jeff Siegel: The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages.

Jeff Siegel: The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages.

Simple Past Tense Markers in Turkish and Some American Indian Languages in Terms of Evidentiality

Simple Past Tense Markers in Turkish and Some American Indian Languages in Terms of Evidentiality

The Second Language Acquisition of Past Tense Marker in English by L1 Speakers of Chinese

This study is considered the L2 acquisition and underlying of past tense marker, focusing on whether or not L2 learners of English are successful in associating the grammatical properties with Chinese language. Although the dataset is small, the results showed that Chinese speakers are able to acquire the past-tense marker although Chinese language has none of this feature. The L1 Chinese speakers are able to acquire the regular past-tense marker better co mpared to the irregular form. Keywords: Second language acquisition; Past tense marker; L1 Chinese speakers; Irregular form Resume: Cet article etudie l'acquisition d’une deuxieme langue, et en particulier l’apprentissage du passe, en se concentrant sur le fait si les apprenants de l'anglais pouvaient reussir a associer les proprietes grammaticales de la langue anglaise avec la langue chinoise. Bien que l'ensemble des donnees est faible, les resultats montrent que les locuteurs du chinois sont capable de maitriser le passe, meme si la langue chinoise n'a pas cette fonctionnalite. Les locuteurs du chinois maitrise mieux le passe en forme reguliere par rapport en forme irreguliere. Mots-Cles: acquisition d’une deuxieme langue; temps passer; les locuteurs du chinois; forme irreguliere

Acquisition of English Tense‐Aspect Morphology by Advanced French Instructed Learners

The acquisition of English verbal morphology has been mostly tested as a second language (L2) in English-speaking settings (Bardovi-Harlig, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1998; Bardovi-Harlig & Bergstrom, 1996; Bayley, 1991, 1994), more rarely as a foreign language (e.g., Robison, 1990, 1995), in only one cross-sectional study with native speakers of French in a foreign/L2 setting in Quebec (Collins, 2002), and never with French speakers living in France, who have much less exposure to English than their Francophone counterparts living in Quebec. The present cross-sectional study analyzes data from a group of 21 high school French speakers learning English in France to address two main research questions: (a) Do our learners exhibit nativelike performance in their use of the various past morphological forms across the lexical aspectual classes (e.g., Vendler, 1957/1967)? (b) Does their first language lead French speakers to overuse the English present perfect due to its morphological similarity with the passe compose? Our findings underscore the effect of lexical aspect on the use of past tense markers while highlighting a significant departure from the predicted developmental path of past tense marking: States are marked more consistently than telic events in the narrative task. Possible theoretical and methodological factors that might account for the present findings are discussed.

The nature and origins of counterfactuality in simple clauses: Cross-linguistic evidence

This paper is a cross-linguistic study of counterfactuality in simple clauses, as in the English construction The police should have intervened. On the basis of a representative sample of languages, we investigate (i) how counterfactuality is most commonly marked, and (ii) what these patterns of marking can tell us about the nature and origins of counterfactuality. We first show that counterfactuality is most frequently marked by a combination of elements that have other functions in other contexts, rather than by one single ‘dedicated’ marker. Contrary to popular belief, neither past tense nor imperfective aspect is a universal feature in the combinations of markers used to signal counterfactuality: the only type of element that is found in every combination is a modal element marking some type of potentiality, which can be combined (i) with past-tense markers, (ii) with a combination of past tense and aspectual (perfect or perfective) markers, or (iii) just with aspectual markers. On the basis of these findings about the marking of counterfactuality, we argue that counterfactuality typically originates as a semanticization of pragmatic information, more specifically an implicature derived from the compositional meaning of a combination of a modal element and a past, perfect or perfective element.

FOSSILIZATION IN INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES BY PERSIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

This paper provides a cross-sectional study of the fossilized endstate L2 English grammar of freshmen and junior university students of English. Results are presented from spontaneous production and grammaticality judgment tasks of two groups of the students, high-level (24) and low-level (19), concentrating on use of 3ʳᵈ person simple present marker (-s), past tens marker (-ed) and pronominal case assignment. Data showed that despite low rate of suppliance of 3ʳᵈ person imple present tense marker (-s) just in spontaneous task, students' suppliance of past tense marker (-ed) and pronominal case assignment is about perfect at both levels and tasks. Syntactic correlates (such as case assignment and presence of overt subject) were completely accurate, suggesting no underlying impairment to functional categories or features. There is some evidence from the L1, which has the person and number features of the subject marked by verbal agreement but usually lacks the thirdperson singular in production task.

Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language (review)

Reviewed by: Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language by Mary D. Swift Edward J. Vajda Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language. By Mary D. Swift. (Studies on language acquisition 24.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xii, 315. ISBN 3110181207. $137 (Hb). Most studies of child language acquisition up till now have focused on Indo-European or the major languages of East Asia. An investigation of how children master the typologically very different structure of a language such as Inuktitut is therefore of considerable theoretical interest. This book describes how children up to the age of three and a half acquire the mechanisms of time reference in the Tarramiut (Hudson Strait) subdialect of Inuktitut, a language spoken by about fifteen hundred Inuit in arctic Quebec. Introductory chapters describe the tense-aspect-mood system of adult Inuktitut, and survey what is known crosslinguistically about how TAM morphology is acquired in early childhood. The data analyzed derive from corpora collected from eight children for two previous studies: Cultural context in communicative interaction of young Inuit children by Martha Crago (Montreal: McGill University dissertation, 1988) and Aspects of argument structure acquisition in Inuktitut by Shanley Allen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996). Note that S investigates the acquisition of a different facet of language structure from these earlier studies. Her description of the verb morphology in adult Tarramiut is also important, given the lack of any comparable overview. Publications on related aspects of Inuktitut grammar or other Inuit dialects are surveyed briefly on pp. 8–11. The last six chapters document how young children learning Inuktitut as a native language master increasingly more complex tense-aspect structures. The first verb forms acquired are zero-marked for tense-aspect. Among these, telic verbs tend to be used to express past completed events, while atelic verbs express present ongoing events. S shows how children later add suffixes marking viewpoint aspect, as well as suffixes marking degrees of temporal remoteness in the past or future. The results are particularly illuminating when compared to existing studies of European languages since this represents the first study of child acquisition of morphemes marking temporal remoteness. S uncovers a number of patterns that pose a challenge to previous assumptions about universal tendencies in child language acquisition. All of these, however, find explanation in light of the system of time reference characteristic of adult Inuktitut. For example, because Inuktitut encodes a basic future/nonfuture distinction rather than the more familiar past/nonpast dichotomy characteristic of European languages, the Inuit children surveyed naturally developed future markers before past markers. They also used overt past tense markers with atelic verbs first rather than with telic verbs. These findings contrast with studies based on the acquisition of European languages, where past tense marking with telic verbs is primary, and future markers appear later than markers of past tense. S’s results clearly testify to the importance of examining as broad a typological range of languages as possible before drawing conclusions about universal tendencies in child language acquisition. The book ends with suggestions for future research, including the need to measure passive knowledge of time reference mechanisms in young Inuit children, as well as to examine acquisition in older children acquiring Inuktitut as a native language. Finally, one can only hope this study will stimulate investigations into how children acquire other complex morphologies. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America ...

Dynamic and Stative Information in Temporal Reasoning: Interpretation of Korean Past Markers in Narrative Discourse

This paper compares the Korean past tense marker -ess with another past form -essess (double past), the distinction between which has been controversial among Korean linguists, and provides a discourse-based semantic analysis of them. It is argued that -ess and -essess are logically distinguished in terms of dynamic versus stative information in dynamic semantics, which is more or less in line with the distinction between the English past and the past perfect. The simple past in English and the Korean -ess at least have the potential to give dynamic information, updating the given context with a new event and shifting the current temporal perspective. The English past perfect and the Korean --essess, on the other hand, provide stative, background information, preserving the given context. However, while the English past perfect is ambiguous between preterit and aspectual inter-pretations, Korean -essess has only the preterit interpretation, triggering a flashback effect in narratives. Their semantic properties and differences are represented in Discourse Representation Theory.

Does past tense marking indicate the acquisition of the concept of temporal displacement in children's cognitive development?

The acquisition of past tense markers has often been considered to parallel conceptual development in the domain of time (e.g., Weist, 1986). However, the precise relationship between linguistic marking of time in childrenís speech and conceptual development has not been investigated in data-based research. This study analyses longitudinal speech data from four Japanese children to determine whether the use of the past tense form actually coincides with its use to signal past time. The results show that the relationship between contrastive use of the form and truly deictic past is not a straightforward one; for all the children, deictic use emerges later than the contrastive use of past and nonpast forms.

Difference or Deficit in Speakers of African American English?

Difference or Deficit in Speakers of African American English?

The Deictic Core of 'Non-Experienced Past' in Cuzco Quechua

Many typologically distinct languages express indirect evidentiality in their tense/aspect system. This paper studies the past tense marker -sqa of Cuzco Quechua which gives rise to indirect evidential interpretations. In Quechua, evidentiality is primarily expressed by a system of enclitics which specify the speaker's type of source of information as the best possible, reportative, or conjectural. This paper argues that -sqa is not of the same type as these enclitics. The latter encode an evidential relation between the speaker and the proposition expressed, but -sqa does not. -sqa does also not encode an epistemic relation as has been argued for similar markers of other languages. Instead, -sqa is analysed as a deictic element which locates the described eventuality outside the speaker's perceptual field at topic time. The evidential interpretations associated with -sqa arise only indirectly from this spatial meaning. The Quechua data suggest that two types of evidentiality have to be distinguished: propositional-level evidentiality, which is a relation between the speaker and the proposition, and event-level evidentiality, which, in the case of Quechua, is deictically induced.

Rupturing implicature in the Mapudungun verbal system: The suffix- [formula omitted

This paper focuses on the analysis of the meaning of the verbal suffix - Fi in the frame of the Tense-Aspect-Modality system in Mapudungun. A few recent works have recognized some other features of this marker - traditionally described as a past tense marker - related to modal meaning, counterexpectation, or rupture of current condition of facts. I argue that the Verval suffix - F1 is a metapragmatic operator that acts to warn against, block, or rupture conventional implicature in speech. The present study intends to be a contribution to crosslinguistic research in Pragmatics, since those grammatical categories that express the speaker's alerting to the implicature created in speech seem to be widely spread in American Indian languages, in contrast to Indoeu-ropean languages.

A Perfect Marker in Israeli Sign Language

In this paper I argue for the existence of an aspectual marker in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) denoting perfect constructions. This marker is the sign glossed as ALREADY. Though this sign often occurs in past time contexts, I argue that it is a perfect-aspect marker and not a past tense marker. This claim is supported by the following observations: (a) ALREADY can co-occur with past, present and future time adverbials; (b) its core meaning is to relate a resultant state to a prior event; (c) it occurs much more in dialogues than in narrative contexts. Further examination of the properties and functions of ALREADY in the language reveals that it shares many properties with perfect constructions in other languages. In addition, it is shown that the co-occurrence of ALREADY with various time adverbials, as well as with the durational aspectual modulation, gives rise to a rich aspectual system in the language. This aspectual system is compared to similar systems in other languages. The ISL system turns out to be very different from that of Hebrew on the one hand, while showing significant similarities to that of ASL. However, there are also some differences between ISL and ASL aspectual markers, which might be due to the relative youth of ISL, and to the different source for the aspectual marker: a verbin the case of ASL, and an adverb in ISL.