Past Morpheme Research Articles

Past interpretation and graded tense in Medumba

This paper provides a formal semantic analysis of past interpretation in Medumba (Grassfields Bantu), a graded tense language. Based on original fieldwork, the study explores the empirical behavior and meaning contribution of graded past morphemes in Medumba and relates these to the account of the phenomenon proposed in Cable (Nat Lang Semant 21:219–276, 2013) for Gĩkũyũ. Investigation reveals that the behavior of Medumba gradedness markers differs from that of their Gĩkũyũ counterparts in meaningful ways and, more broadly, discourages an analysis as presuppositional eventuality or reference time modifiers. Instead, the Medumba markers are most appropriately analyzed as quantificational tenses. It also turns out that Medumba, though belonging to the typological class of graded tense languages, shows intriguing similarities to genuinely tenseless languages in allowing for temporally unmarked sentences and exploiting aspectual and pragmatic cues for reference time resolution. The more general cross-linguistic implication of the study is that the set of languages often subsumed under the label “graded tense” does not in fact form a natural class and that more case-by-case research is needed to refine this category.

A case study in the acquisition of three types of morphemes in english by a bilingual child

This case study looks closely at the bilingual first language acquisition of a Costa Rican child who was raised through OPOL (One Parent One Language) and Minority Language at Home (mL@H).The subject, Itzel, was raised in a Spanish-speaking environment and her dad is the only person that has spoken to her in English since her birth up to the present. It is explained throughout the study that the use of several native English resources complemented the acquisition of the English language. For this study, a descriptive method was used. The Wug test was applied to the subject to determine the level of acquisition of the plural morphemes, third person singular morphemes, and past tense morphemes of regular verbs. Finally a comparison of 2011 Wug test and 2014 test is made to determine mastery of these morphemes in a period of three (3) years. The results proved that the subject did acquire naturally the studied morphemes and the Wug test shows some aspects of the interlanguage development related to the acquisition of morphemes done by the subject of the study.

The Acquisition of Evidentiality and Source Monitoring

ABSTRACTEvidentiality in language marks how information contained in a sentence was acquired. For instance, Turkish has two past-tense morphemes that mark whether access to information was direct (typically, perception) or indirect (hearsay/inference). Full acquisition of evidential systems appears to be a late achievement cross-linguistically. Currently, there are two distinct hypotheses about why this is so. According to the first hypothesis, the acquisition of evidentiality is delayed by conceptual factors related to source monitoring (the process of identifying and evaluating information sources). According to a different hypothesis, a substantial part of the learning difficulty comes from mapping evidential markers onto the underlying source concepts (even if these concepts are already available to the child), most likely because source concepts do not correspond to observable referents in the world. Here we tested these two hypotheses in a series of experiments comparing the acquisition of evidential morphology (Experiments 1–3) and the development of source monitoring (Experiments 4–6) in the same group of Turkish-speaking children. We found that the semantics and pragmatics of evidential morphology in Turkish are not acquired until age 6 or 7. A comparison between linguistic evidentiality and source monitoring experiments revealed that conceptual understanding of information access develops before the corresponding concepts are linked to evidential morphemes in Turkish, thereby demonstrating that mapping difficulties underlie the late acquisition of evidentiality in Turkish. Nevertheless, our data also suggest that conceptual limitations play an important role in the acquisition of evidentiality, since in both language and source monitoring direct evidence seems to be privileged compared to indirect evidence. This work has implications for the acquisition of mental-state language and the relation between children’s linguistic and conceptual development.

Grammatical aspect is a strength in the language comprehension of young children with autism spectrum disorder.

The comprehension of tense/aspect morphology by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was assessed via Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) to determine whether this population's difficulties with producing these morphemes extended to their comprehension. Four-year-old participants were assessed twice, 4 months apart. They viewed a video that presented side-by-side ongoing and completed events paired with familiar verbs with past tense and progressive morphology. Their eye movements were recorded and coded offline; the IPL measures included percentage of looking time at, and latency of first look to, the matching scene. Spontaneous speech samples were also obtained and coded for number of words, past tense, and progressive inflections. Relative to their baseline preferences, these 4-year-old children with ASD looked more quickly to and longer at the matching scene for both morphemes. Children who produced more words, including progressive and past morphemes, and those who performed better on standardized language assessments demonstrated better comprehension of -ing. Overall, these children with ASD demonstrated consistent comprehension of grammatical aspect morphology; moreover, their degree of comprehension was found to correlate with spontaneous production and standardized test scores.

Kick the Ball or Kicked the Ball? Perception of the Past Morpheme –ed by Second Language Learners

Abstract: Explanations for the well-documented second language (L2) learning challenge of the English regular past include verb semantics (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), phonetic properties (Goad, White, & Steele, 2003), and frequency factors (Collins, Trofimovich, White, Cardoso, & Horst, 2009). Difficulty perceiving past-tense morphology (i.e., hearing –ed in the input) has received less research attention. In this study, we explored the roles of three perceptual factors (phonological environment, speech rate, semantic clues) among 106 L2 learners and 81 English speakers of a similar age. Experiment 1 was a forced-choice auditory identification task contrasting perceptually ‘easy’ ([əd] + vowel) and ‘hard’ ([t] or [d] + consonant) regular past contexts at normal conversational speed. Experiment 2 contrasted easy and hard contexts at a slowed-down speech rate. Experiment 3 included time adverbials that matched or mismatched the tense marker (e.g., walked the dog now vs. walked the dog yesterday). The L2 learners behaved at just above chance at normal conversational speed in both contexts, and slowing speech down helped them in easy contexts only. The English speakers were more accurate in easy than in hard contexts regardless of speech rate. Both L2 learners and English speakers also relied on adverbials at the expense of the phonetic cue to past morphology (–ed). Implications of these findings for the roles of input and frequency in L2 learning, and for pronunciation teaching (i.e., setting reasonable learning goals) are discussed.

Semantic properties of the so-called past tense morpheme in Late Late Middle Japanese

This article, which provides the very first formal semantic analysis of Late Late Middle Japanese (LLMJ) data, discusses adjectival (non-preterit) interpretations of the so-called past tense morpheme -ta in LLMJ and contemporary New Japanese (cNJ), accounting for their similarities and differences. We explain the historical semantic change of -ta and its predecessors as a gradual change from a resultative to a perfect and then to a preterit, in compliance with Maslov’s (in: Nedjalkov (ed.) Typology of resultative constructions, 1988) hypothesis. Adjectival -ta is restricted to prenominal modifier cases in cNJ, but is found in both prenominal and matrix clause cases in LLMJ. Assuming that a matrix clause must be tensed, we argue that -ta is used as an aspect morpheme -tastate, and that a verbal complex V-tastate could in principle be suffixed by a tense morpheme. This analysis is needed for LLMJ and constitutes a major departure from the previous works dealing with adjectival -ta in cNJ such as Kusumoto (in: Cuervo et al. (eds.) Formal approaches to Japanese Linguistics 3, 2001) and Ogihara (Linguist Philos 27: 557–608, 2004). According to our account, V-tastate-tapast is illicit in both LLMJ and cNJ. The form V-tastate-∅present is licit in LLMJ, whereas cNJ only accepts the tenseless form V-tastate, which reflects the gradual marginalization of this construction over the course of Japanese language history. This accounts for the distributional constraint on adjectival -ta in cNJ. Regarding semantic interpretation, V-tastate asserts in both LLMJ and cNJ that a target state (Parsons, Events in the semantics of English: A study in subatomic semantics, 1990) of V-ing holds now without entailing that V actually occurred in the past. This semantic proposal is couched in an intensional analysis of -tastate.

The Simple Past Puzzle. A Study of Some Aspects of the Syntax and Semantics of Tense

In this paper, I claim that the so-called present perfect puzzle is, in reality, a puzzle about the simple past. It is the latter, I argue, that shows a puzzling behavior, given that it can be used not only in definite contexts but also in seemingly indefinite ones. I employ the notions of time frame and specifiability to show how the obvious distinction between the two tenses in terms of temporal logic can be accounted for. I also propose that the past morpheme -ed be considered a kind of verb determiner which selects a temporal XP as a complement. Such complement can be (and usually is) expressed either in the sentence or in the larger discourse; however, it can also remain implicit, or covert.

Evaluating the effectiveness of therapy based around Shape Coding to develop the use of regular past tense morphemes in two children with language impairments

It has been suggested that difficulties with tense and agreement marking are a core feature of language impairment. Hence, studies are required that analyse the effectiveness of intervention in this area, including consideration of whether changes seen in therapy sessions generalize to spontaneous speech. This study assessed the effectiveness of therapy based around Shape Coding in developing the use of the regular past tense morpheme -ed in two school-aged children with language impairments. It also considered whether participants benefited from additional generalization therapy in order to start using target forms in their spontaneous speech. The former was assessed using a sentence completion task and the latter by a conversational task with blind assessors. One participant improved markedly in sentence completion but did not gain in the conversation task until after the generalization therapy. The other made more modest gains on the sentence completion task and seemed to generalize to the conversation task without recourse to the generalization therapy. Larger studies are required to confirm these interpretations and to determine whether they are applicable to the wider population of children with language impairments.

Acquiring Regular and Irregular Past Tense Morphemes in English and French: Evidence From Bilingual Children

The aim of this study was to use crosslinguistic data from French‐English bilinguals to test two models of past tense acquisition: (a) single route (all past tense forms rely on morphophonological schemas) and (b) dual route (irregular forms are learned as words, regulars through rules). These models make similar predictions about English acquisition, the focus of most previous research. French irregular verbs are often low in token frequency but high in family resemblance. Past tense forms of regular and irregular verbs in English and French were elicited from children between 3 and 5 years of age. Both models could explain most results. Two findings with French were more compatible with a single‐route model, suggesting that this is a stronger explanation for crosslinguistic data.

The development of suppletive and affixal tense and agreement morphemes in the L3 English of Basque-Spanish bilinguals

This article examines the third language (L3) developing morphology of 78 Basque—Spanish bilinguals following a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program and a mainstream English as a foreign language (non-CLIL) program. The analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal oral data shows that (1) the omission of inflection in the L3 English interlanguage of these groups of learners is due to problems with the realization of surface morphology, (2) there is a dissociation in frequency of suppliance between suppletive inflection (copula and auxiliary be) and affixal inflection (the third person morpheme -s and the past tense morpheme -ed) already attested in L2 data, and (3) no significant differences were found between the two groups tested as far as the development of suppletive and affixal tense and agreement morphemes. The overall findings seem to support full-UG explanations for the variable use of morphology in the acquisition of non-native systems.

A Two-Tiered Analysis of Sequence of Tense in English

Unlike languages like Korean, Japanese, and Russian, English uses past tense for the simultaneous reading of a complement clause under a matrix past tense. This phenomenon has been referred to in the literature as Sequence of Tense (SOT). Several authors, including Stowell (1995), have argued that when the main clause has a past time reference, the English past morpheme has two meanings: a simultaneous reading (PRESENT) and a past-shifted reading (PAST). Using the mechanism of a Deictic tense Projection and an Anaphoric Tense Projection. this paper argues that the SOT Rule in languages like English is a syntactic rule that copies the Deictic Tense Projection of the matrix clause into the embedded clause, in order to set up an anaphoric link within the clause boundary. It is also argued that the past morpheme has one meaning, i.e. PAST. For the simultaneous reading, the rule is applied to the complement clause, whereas for the past-shifted reading, it is not. Thus, it is shown that SOT is important mechanism that prevents the ambiguity between a deictic reading (independent interpretation) and an anaphoric reading (dependent interpretation) that exists in non-SOT languages like Japanese and Korean.

The role of type and token frequency in using past tense morphemes correctly

Type and token frequency have been thought to be important in the acquisition of past tense morphology, particularly in differentiating regular and irregular forms. In this study we tested the role of frequency in two ways: (1) in bilingual children, who typically use and hear either language less often than monolingual children and (2) cross-linguistically: French and English have different patterns of frequency of regular/irregular verbs. Ten French-English bilingual children, 10 French monolingual and 10 English monolingual children between 4 and 6 years watched a cartoon and re-told the story. The results demonstrated that the bilingual children were less accurate than the monolingual children. Their accuracy in both French and English regular and irregular verbs corresponded to frequency in the input language. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that children learn past tense morphemes by analogy with other words in their vocabularies. We propose a developmental sequence based on conservative generalization across a growing set of verbs.

Variation in Form-Meaning Mapping between Korean and English Counterfactuals

This paper extends and applies to Korean, Iatridou’s analysis of past tense morphology in counterfactuals. The paper shows that just as in English, past tense morphology can be used to convey counterfactuality in Korean. While this fact accounts for many similarities between English and Korean counterfactuals, some differences between the two languages are also attested. The variation in form-meaning mapping between English and Korean counterfactuals is accounted for with the proposal that once the past tense is mapped onto the meaning component that conveys counterfactuality, the range of possible temporal interpretations for a counterfactual is literally determined by the LF of the relevant clause minus the past tense morpheme. If this LF has a present (or past) interpretation, the counterfactual will have a present (or past) interpretation. But if this LF is not interpretable, the counterfactual will not be interpretable either, resulting in ungrammaticality.

Modality in Contemporary English (review)

Reviewed by: Modality in contemporary English ed. by Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, and Frank Palmer Rong Chen Modality in contemporary English. Ed. by Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, and Frank Palmer. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. 396. ISBN 3110176866. $132.30 (Hb). This volume is a collection of papers from the Verona Conference on Modality in Contemporary English (University of Verona, 2001). In addition to an introduction by Frank Palmer, it contains fifteen articles, grouped under four headings: the semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs, the status of emerging modal items, stylistic variation and change, and sociolinguistic variation and syntactic modals. In the first section, ‘The semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs’, Paul Larreya argues that a past-tense morpheme of modals always expresses a presupposition. Richard Matthews demonstrates that the interpretation of modals is determined by construction, context, and convention. Gregory Ward, Betty Birner, and Jeffrey Kaplan argue that would is used to express a salient open-proposition, a predictable meaning based on the previous utterance. Also focusing on the pragmatics of modals, Stephane Gresset’s work relates the use of could and might to the basic meanings of can and may, respectively. The second section, ‘The status of emerging modal items’, also includes four papers. Philippe Bourdin deftly shows how go, in go undetected and go thinking, has evolved into an exponent of aspectual values in line with the semantics of the un-V-en and V-ing constructions. Similarly, Keith Mitchell maintains that had better and might as well have been grammaticalized into full-fledged modals. More theoretical is Heidi Verplaetse’s paper on want to, in which the author argues that the expression of volition with want to is gaining pace in contemporary English. Finally, Garita Paradis demonstrates that the interpretation of really results from the interaction between the ontological notion of [REALITY] and the construal of really in particular contexts. The third section of the book, ‘Stylistic variation and change’, begins with Geoffrey Leech’s quantitative study showing that semi-modals have been increasing at the expense of central modals over the last three decades. Supporting Leech is Nicholas Smith, who documents the same trend, although in the obligation/necessity domain. The third paper, by Maurizio Gotti, focuses on shall vs. will, but over a much longer time period. He demonstrates that the two modals have experienced a gradual decrease in deontic meanings but an increase in their dynamic values. Roberta Facchinetti, by contrast, looks at the distribution of may across text types. She finds, among other things, that may is a useful tool for scholars to signal their stance of objectivity. The last section of the volume, ‘Sociolinguistic variation and syntactic modals’, contains three articles. Jennifer Coates discovers that women use epistemic modals more than men, a fact she attributes to women’s tendency to self-disclose and their preference for open discussion and conversational collaboration. The other two articles are syntactic. Stephen Nagle proposes that the double-modal construction (might could) can be best accounted for as two clauses. Graeme Trousdale studies the patterns of sociolinguistic variation in the use of modals in Tyneside English and proposes that a valid account requires the combined efforts of both variationists and structuralists. Rong Chen California State University, San Bernardino Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

Orthography and underlying form in incomplete neutralization

Either orthographic distinctions or underlying morphological distinctions might cause incomplete neutralization. Much previous work has found small durational differences between pairs such as German ‘‘Rad’’ ‘‘wheel’’ and ‘‘Rat’’ ‘‘advice,’’ which are traditionally said to be neutralized to [rat] in both cases. Incomplete neutralization effects are stronger when the task emphasizes orthography, and when the underlying distinction is orthographically encoded. Previous work by the authors investigated a case where orthography differs, but the underlying form of the two words is arguably the same, e.g., Dutch ‘‘heten’’ ‘‘to be called’’ and ‘‘heetten’’ ‘‘they were called,’’ both /he:tən/. Incomplete neutralization was found, indicating a role for orthography rather than an underlying form. However, that case may also be interpreted as having a difference in the underlying form because of the past tense morpheme /-t/ in ‘‘heetten.’’ The current work investigates pairs which have the same underlying morphological difference, but no difference in spelling, e.g., ‘‘(ik) laat’’ (/la:t/) ‘‘(I) leave’’ and ‘‘(hij) laat’’ (/la:t-t/) ‘‘(he) leaves.’’ These pairs show no significant durational differences, despite an experimental design with quite high power. Thus, incomplete neutralization effects can be caused by an orthographic difference, but cannot be caused by this type of morphological difference.

Embedded Tense and Universal Grammar

Languages that allows a vacuous past tense morpheme in complement clauses of attitude verbs are referred to as SOT (sequence-of-tense) languages, and languages that do not are referred to as non-SOT languages. This squib observes that quite generally, if in a given language the present tense morpheme obligatorily refers to the utterance time in present-under-past sentences, that language allows a vacuous past. The author shows that in order to account for this correlation, any theory of SOT has to be supplemented with a principle of Universal Grammar that requires every well-formed matrix sentence to be embeddable under a propositional attitude verb. He calls this principle the Embeddability Principle

Effect of lexical cues on the production of active and passive sentences in Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia

This study compared the sentence production abilities of individuals with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia in an attempt to explore the extent to which impaired lexical retrieval impedes sentence production. The ability to produce active and passive reversible and non-reversible sentences was examined when varying amounts of lexical information was provided. The results showed that both Wernicke’s and Broca’s aphasic individuals were impaired in passive sentence production and that these difficulties were not overcome when lexical cues (the relevant nouns and uninflected verb) were provided. However when auxiliary and past tense morphemes were provided along with the verb stem, production of passive sentences improved drastically for both groups. Analysis of error patterns, however, revealed differences between the two groups, suggesting that Broca’s aphasic subjects may find passive sentences difficult due to problems with retrieving the relevant grammatical morphemes. Subjects with Wernicke’s aphasia may have been unable to automatically access the passive sentence structure.

The Phonology and Morphology of Reduplication (review)

Reviewed by: The phonology and morphology of reduplication by Eric Raimy Andrew Nevins The phonology and morphology of reduplication. By Eric Raimy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Pp. 201. $97.80. The myriad processes of reduplication have often been romanticized as providing a ‘blueprint’ for phonology—a window into larger mechanisms of morphological expression and phonological computation. Eric Raimy’s book, a revised version of his 1999 dissertation at the University of Delaware, presents an entirely new theoretical framework for the analysis of the various patterns of reduplication attested in the world’s languages. The important contributions of the work are threefold: its explicit formalization of precedence relationships in the phonology, its rejection of the reduplicant as the exponent of a terminal in the morphology, and its characterization of overapplication and underapplication effects, analyzed as the result of the ordering of phonological processes before transfer of the representation to the articulatory interface. R’s blueprint, a representational proposal developed through examination of reduplication phenomena, bears broader consequences if we wish to understand phonological computation as a generative procedure of establishing relations between segments. The book begins with a fundamental observation: Precedence relations, implicit in the statement of any phonological rule or constraint, can be explicitly encoded in the representation of the segmental string. It often goes without saying that a Chomsky & Halle 1968 (hereafter SPE)- style rule of the form A → B / C __ D can only apply if C precedes A and A precedes D; such left-to-right precedence relations have been implicit throughout generative phonology.1 R employs the graph-theoretic notation of a precedence arrow (X → Y) to explicitly represent that a segment X linearly precedes a segment Y at a level of phonological representation. Motivating the ontological necessity of such relations, R argues that all native speakers know that in their language, the phonological string [t → a → k] is distinct from [k → a → t]; there are no ‘anagrammic’ languages in which these two are not contrastive. Following the formalization of these asymmetric, irreflexive, transitive precedence relations, and the observation that every segment has an immediate predecessor and an immediate successor, R defines two special symbols: the start symbol (#), which has no predecessor, and the end symbol (%), which has no successor.2 The precedence-based representation of a phonological word such as [tak], then, is illustrated as [# → t → a → k → %]. R departs from a morphophonological analysis in which reduplication is a copying operation that results in the exponence of an abstract morpheme, often referred to in the literature as Red. Instead, R proposes that reduplication results from a readjustment rule accompanying zero-affixation. Readjustment rules, originally proposed in SPE, are phonological rules that operate on a base in ‘reaction’ to affixation. For example, Halle & Marantz 1993 analyzes the ablaut in the past tense of English strong verbs (sing-sang) as the result of a phonological rule applying in the environment of the realization of a phonologically null past tense morpheme. R’s novel step is to propose that reduplication is a readjustment rule of the same sort; its effect, however, is not the alteration of particular segmental features but rather the introduction of a precedence relation to the representation. On this view, total reduplication results from the affixation of a zero morpheme (the exponent for the morphosyntactic features of the desiderative, or perfective, etc.) followed by a readjustment rule that adds a precedence relation between the final segment in the string and the initial segment in the string. The process is exemplified in 1. The representation in 1 is a departure from the simple notion of precedence implicit in all previous phonological representations. That is, R allows for multiple precedence. In 1, [t] is immediately preceded by two segments, # and [k]; likewise, the segment [k] immediately precedes not one but two segments: % and [t] are both its immediate successors. R claims that representations [End Page 770] such as 1 may persist throughout the phonology but that the realization of 1 as [taktak] is due to limitations imposed by the interface between phonology and the articulatory system, through which such a representation cannot persist. Following the lead of Michaels 1989 in the phonology literature and Noam...

From D-to-T: determiner incorporation and the creation of tense.

Investigating the shi-de cleft construction in northern dialects of Mandarin Chinese, this paper argues for the novel ongoing creation of a new past tense morpheme from the incorporation of a D0 element (de) into the verb. The re-analysis is pragmatically suggested to result from the strengthening of a past time conversational implicature commonly associated with the shi-de construction, and syntactically to constitute an example of 'lateral grammaticalization', a process in which a functional head from one domain (e.g., the DP) may under certain circumstances undergo re-interpretation as an essentially equivalent functional head in a second domain (e.g., the CP/clausal domain). The analysis proposed resolves certain apparent contradictions in the positioning and interpretation of objects, adverbs, and wh-adjuncts in shi-de forms, and results in the conclusion that speakers actually maintain a dual analysis of de as either a D0 or a T0 depending on the temporal orientation of the shi-de form.

Is there a relative past tense in English?

Abstract Traditional analyses of the past tense such as Reichenbach's (1947) and Comrie's (1985) assign a single semantic structure to the past tense and do not distinguish between absolute and relative past tenses in English. In the present article it is argued that we cannot do without the notion of a relative past tense. Ten empirically based arguments are adduced in support of this. The author also discusses six possible tests to distinguish between absolute and relative past tenses in concrete examples and points out that the analysis has some important theoretical implications. He argues that the distinction between absolute and relative tenses requires a model of the English tense system that is based on the concept of temporal domain, and that the traditional analysis of the meaning of the past tense morpheme (viz. ‘Event time anterior to speech time’) stands in need of qualification.