Tense and Aspect Systems

Hebrew philologists disagree on how to describe the biblical Hebrew verbal system. We especially disagree about the difference in meaning between the main verb forms: yiqtol and qatal, wayyiqtol, weyiqtol, weqatal: is it tense, taxis, aspect, modality, or something else that prompts the use of one form rather than the other?
In this paper I clarify the semantic value of the finite verb forms in biblical Hebrew by identifying a model that accounts for the selection of verb forms in a limited corpus: the narrative beginning in 1 Samuel.
This study contributes to the resolution of the question of Biblical Hebrew verb form semantics by using the same method I applied to Qumran Hebrew: analyzing all the verbs in this narrative, using an empirical method of statistical correlation between form and meaning. I first produced a computer database of all the verbs in this corpus, tagged for formal features such as morphology, situation aspect, and word order on one hand, and semantic functions such as time reference, viewpoint aspect, and modality on the other. I then determined the strength of an association between each form and each function. Finally, I used the patterns found in these correlations to (1) evaluate conflicting proposed interpretations, and (2) construct a model that accounts for the ancient Hebrew author’s choice of verb forms in this corpus.
In this paper I first introduce the problem of Hebrew tense and aspect, then very briefly outline the basics of relevant theoretical linguistics, significant methodological issues, and previous attempts to explain the Hebrew verbs, synthesize statistical trends from the database into hypotheses, and describe the results of applying these hypotheses to specific verbs in 1 Samuel 1-2.

This paper analyses a type of structurally complex time adjuncts in Portuguese, and focuses on aspects of linguistic variation - and sometimes anomaly -, witnessed by the coexistence of various forms to express the same temporal relation. The time adjuncts in question involve (retrospective or prospective) temporal measurement from an anchor point, as in the counterparts of the English expressions "two months ago", "two months before the elections" or "wo months from now". The awareness of the large amount of variation within the dating subsystem - observed in e.g. newspapers and science books - is of special importance for linguistic normalisation and natural language processing.

In this paper we present a semantic analysis of the imperfective paradox based on the Event Calculus (van Lambalgen & Hamm 2004), a planning formalism characterizing a class of models which can be computed by connectionist networks. We report the results of a questionnaire that support the semantic theory and suggest that different aspectual classes of VPs in the progressive give rise to different entailment patterns. Further, a processing model is outlined, combining the semantic analysis with the psycholinguistic principle of immediacy in the framework of recurrent networks. The model is used to derive predictions concerning the electrophysiological correlates of the computations described by the Event Calculus.

The article is devoted to the aspectual semantics of simplex (non-prefixed) verbs in Old Russian. Traditionally, these verbs have been considered to be aspectually unspecified in the Old Russian period. However, our analysis shows that already in the ancient period the class of simplexes was heterogeneous with respect to aspectual semantics;
several subclasses can be distinguished. The article offers a method (based on a complex approach that takes into account a number of morphological and semantic parameters) and algorithms that allow us determine the aspectual meaning of a particular verbal lexeme. It is also argued that for determining the aspectual status of a perfective or an imperfective verb morphological and semantic parameters (and prohibitions) have different degrees of importance. That indicates a certain asymmetry of the aspectual system observed in the Old Russian language.

This work analyzes the persistence of the model of the Spanish tenses proposed by Bello (1841), considering both the nuclear system and its extensions, specifically in the indicative mood. The model proposed by Bello is a landmark in the history of Spanish grammar because of its elegance and descriptive adequacy. Bello not only proposed a tense scheme of remarkable perfection, but also dealt with problems that will be systematically studied in the XX century with the development of theories of aspectuality, modality and pragmatic meaning.

В статье затрагивается проблема грамматического (системного) значения английского инфинитива, которое остается неопределенным как в теоретических, так и в практических грамматиках. Делается предположение, что когнитивный подход в рамках когнитивной теории времени и вида сможет помочь лучшему пониманию значения и функции инфинитива.

It is argued that the grammatical (systemic) meaning of the English infinitive remains unspecified in current theoretical and applied grammar studies. It is suggested that a cognitive approach in the framework of the Cognitive Theory of Tense and Aspect may facilitate a better understanding of the meaning and function of the infinitive.

The potential risks associated with the use of recycled water have become a matter of concern for many organisations which are recycling water. Out of the many reasons, the major ones are that they are not able to maintain the efficiency of the treatment plant and to meet the high energy demand of these plants. These problems have led to restricted usage of treatment plants by the industries hence they allow the waste water to bypass directly into the natural water bodies without any treatment. This work has taken into consideration the issue of river Yamuna in Delhi, which is one of the most polluted rivers of the world. It has been identified that Nazafgarh drain located in west Delhi has got a major contribution in the polluting Yamuna. The need of the hour is to find an innovative solution to resolve the problem of water recycling and offer a platform to the industries where the burden of treating their factory effluents is taken care of. This paper proposes a 1 MLD water treatment plant based on Soil Biotechnology which can efficiently treat the Nazafgarh drain water and make it fit for disposal into Yamuna. SBT is an eco-friendly and sustainable technology developed at IIT Bombay which provides all levels of treatment in a single evergreen set up open to atmosphere which is odorless, cheap, simple to operate, easy to maintain and could be set up within the area of habilitation.

A futurate is a sentence with no obvious means of future reference, which conveys that a future-oriented eventuality is planned or scheduled. I argue in this paper that the component of planning found in the meaning of futurates should be derived from the more familiar modal concepts of abilities and desires. A futurate statement presupposes that some contextually salient entity d, the director, has the ability to bring it about that p, and asserts that d is committed to bringing it about that p.

Coorientadora: Fernanda de Carvalho Rodrigues Aspecto, segundo Comrie (1976), refere-se às diferentes maneiras de se visualizar a composição temporal interna de uma situação. O aspecto perfect, mais especificamente, é um intervalo de tempo que inclui o momento do evento e se estende até o momento de referência, podendo este coincidir com o presente, o passado ou o futuro, relacionando dois pontos na linha do tempo (PANCHEVA, 2003). Neste trabalho, interessa-nos a combinação do perfect com o

The paper proposes a unified account of the systematic polysemy of French future (FUT) that does not uniquely rely on Aktionsart. It explains the predominant preference for the temporal interpretation of FUT, appealing to the 'future ratification hypothesis'. This is a felicity condition that can be satisfied to different degrees and among competing interpretations the one that satisfies it to the highest degree is preferred. The paper also shows that FUT does not convey uncertainty at utterance time (t u ), and can be used when the attitude holder knows at t u that the embedded proposition is true.

This paper prooves there are no grammatical tenses in Sinhala Language and what have been understand as tenses in contemporary grammar should be interpreted as grammatical aspects nimitha and animitha (roughly perfective and imperfective). This paper is written in Sinhala Language. Originally published in Divaina Newspaper 2017.07.21 and 2017.07.28

Using data from Matsigenka (Arawakan, Peru), this talk argues that the concept of 'path' used in the analysis of directionals and other path-denoting grammatical elements should be decomposed into two components: path geometry and path viewpoint. It is argued that the relationship between path viewpoint and path geometry strongly resembles that between Topic Time and Situation Time in aspectual categories, allowing us to see directionals as the spatio-temporal analogues of aspects.

with Nigel Duffield. INVESTIGATIONES LINGUISTICAE VOL. XL, 2018 © INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTICS – ADAM MICKIEWICZ UNIVERSITY AL. NIEPODLEGŁOŚCI 4, 60-874, POZNAŃ – POLAND. In this paper, we scrutinise the interpretation and distribution of a number of morphemes that serve as means of expressing temporal/aspectual relations in Vietnamese, investigating whether they should treated as genuine tense and aspect markers. The main goals of the study are two-fold: (i) empirically, to offer a comprehensive description of Vietnamese tense and aspect, in both pre-verbal and post-verbal domains; (ii) theoretically, to offer new pieces of evidence supporting the claim that Tense and Aspect exist as independent functional categories in Vietnamese.

Among the seventeen languages spoken in the Banks and Torres groups of north Vanuatu, eleven share a TAM category whose functions include sequential, generic, subjunctive, prospective and imperfective. This aspect, labeled here “aorist”, also displays cross-linguistic formal similarities: everywhere, the aorist marker shows allomorphic variation depending on the person of the subject. After comparing the eleven languages concerned, I propose to reconstruct their protosystem as a set of four portmanteau proclitics {*gu–*u–*ni–*(k)a} combining aspect and person.

This collection of papers deals with the morphosyntax of verbal categories in a broad sample of languages spoken in the Eastern Caucasus. Most of these languages are genetically related and belong to the East Caucasian (alias Nakh-Daghestanian) family, but similarities with surrounding Turkic or North-West Caucasian languages are also touched upon in some of the contributions. MARINA CHUMAKINA's paper "Morphological complexity of Archi verbs" offers a typical example, based on a single and very small, but well studied language, of how verbal forms are built in most East Caucasian languages; TIMUR MAISAK's contribution then studies the present and the future forms within the Lezgic tense and aspect systems focussing on one branch of the family, while a paper by GILLES AUTHIER "From adlocative case to debitive mood without desubordination in Budugh and Kryz" zooms on an understudied sub-branch to address a current debate on morpheme polycategoriality. NINA ...

παρακέκλησθε οὖν µετ᾿ εὐνοίας καὶ προσοχῆς τὴν ἀνάγνωσιν ποιεῖσθαι καὶ συγγνώµην ἔχειν ἐφ᾿ οἷς ἂν δοκῶµεν τῶν κατὰ τὴν ἑρµηνείαν πεφιλοπονηµένων τισὶ τῶν λέξεων ἀδυναµεῖν· οὐ γὰρ ἰσοδυναµεῖ αὐτὰ ἐν ἑαυτοῖς ἑβραϊστὶ λεγόµενα καὶ ὅταν µεταχθῇ εἰς ἑτέραν γλῶσσαν. Σοφία Σειράχ, Prologue 1 .

This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.

Contrastive Analysis has to be understood as a micro-typology able to attain a degree of granularity which is far beyond any macro-typological research. In this regard, given its role as "global language", English will be made fruitful for the purposes of the Contrastive Analysis and of its didactic implications insofar as it will serve as a bridge language for a micro-typology in which it is systematically contrasted in a trilateral comparison with Italian and German. In particular, the paper will focus on three case-studies taken respectively from the temporal-aspectual domain, the morphosyntax of subjects and objects, and the valency alternations in specific verb classes.

I propose that dialectal differences in the use of the present perfect of the indicative mood (PP) in American Spanish could respond to a process of progressive subjectivization from a perfect meaning to an aorist one. This process would deepen a tendency already present in the origin of the PP, and although similar to them, it would have differences with the aorist drifts proposed by Harris (1982) and Squartini and Bertinetto (2000). I propose three situations in the drift of the PP to the aorist in the corpus: that of most Latin American capitals, in which the PP is restricted, in general terms, to being a perfect of result or an existential or continuative perfect, although possibly with an associated subjective appraisal meaning; that of Madrid, in which, together with the cases of perfect meaning, there are hodiernals and, sporadically, aorists; and that of La Paz, in which, in addition to perfect meaning, highlighting aorists are frequent. Lima, in this respect, tends to behave, grosso modo, like the Bolivian capital.
I also propose a process of predicate reduction in the PP sentences. In the original resultative possessive construction, two predicates are stated, one past and one present; later, in the perfect one, a past predicate is made explicit and a present one is pragmatically implied (the one that designates the current state); in the hodiernal and highlighting aorist, on the other hand, only a past predicate that has some specific relevance in the present is made explicit, and in the eventual aorist, finally, a past perfective situation would be made explicit without any other requirement.
Although the aoristic drift observed in the corpus is not the same as that proposed by Harris (1982) or Squartini and Bertinetto (2000), in the more advanced stages, in line with the proposal by Harris, new meanings are added without leaving the previous ones. This suggests a semantic bleaching process  like the ones that occur in grammaticalization.

The paper deals with the peculiarities of the usage of some forms of Perfective verbs
(imperfect and present active participle) in negative contexts in the early East Slavonic
written monuments. The research demonstrates that in Old Russian negation was a significant factor of the context that allowed the usage of Perfective aspect. The functioning of imperfects and present active participles formed from Perfective verbs in negative contexts was semantically close to the special usage of the present forms of Perfective verbs which A. Zaliznjak called «the present of the futile expectation». However, in contrastto the forms of the present, the use of Perfective imperfects and present active participles in negative contexts seems to be a rather archaic phenomenon even in the Old Russian period.

Ausgehend von der methodischen Frage, auf welche Weise kognitive Ansätze der Diskursforschung auf historische Texte Anwendung finden können, rekonstruiert der Vortrag grammatische Muster zur Etablierung von Textwelten im Mittelhochdeutschen. Auf der theoretischen Grundlage der Text-Welt-Theorie (Werth 1999) und der théorie des espaces mentaux (Fauconnier 1984) wird das exemplarisch für den Bereich der Tempora durchgeführt.

The Old Sicilian Confessionali are devotional texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with a very simple textual structure. In particular, two of them, to a large extent, are lists of questions aimed at investigating the sinner and his sins. Nevertheless they prove to be a useful field to define the values of the “passato prossimo” and the “passato remoto”. In the two texts, the two tenses have a clearly distinct distribution. The former has a perfective value, the latter has an aoristic value and, regardless of a temporal criterion, they occur according to this aspectual opposition.

There are languages – e.g., German, Inuktitut, and Russian –
in which the aspectual reference of clauses depends on the telicity of their
event predicates. We argue that in such languages, clauses or verb phrases
not overtly marked for viewpoint aspect implicate or entail ‘event
realization’, a property akin to Parsons’s (1990) ‘culmination’. The
aspectual reference associated with the use of clauses not overtly marked for
aspect is computed in accordance with the dependence of realization
conditions on telicity and in line with principles of Gricean pragmatics. We
formalize event realization and capture the telicity-dependent patterns of
aspectual reference on which it is based by combining Krifka’s (1989, 1992,
1998) event lattices with a model-theoretic interpretation of Klein’s (1994)
theory of tense and aspect. The latter permits us to treat the ‘topic times’ of
aspectual operators as temporal constraints on event realization.

This paper examines the formal structure of the grammatical tense/aspect/mood system in Chontal, a Mayan language from Mexico. The verbal grammar is analyzed as a continuum of semantically and morphosyntactically interrelated phenomena of different sorts, from fully grammaticalized (grammatical core) to those lexical items that may possibly be grammaticalized in the future (grammatical periphery). The distinction between grammatical core and periphery is not only important in order to represent in an appropriate way the internal architecture of a grammatical system, but can also help to better understand semantic properties of its structural components. The core elements are usually ambiguous and express very general meanings; the peripheral elements may optionally make them more precise, thereby disambiguating the utterance.

Видообразуването в НГЕ е една от най-интересните от морфологична гледна точки проблематики, тъй като при образуването на видовите основи в НГЕ се забелязва голямо разнообразие в перфективиращите средства: суфикси, вътрешна флексия, изпадане или добавяне на звукове и пр., дължащи се на морфологични и фонологични процедури, действали в предишни етапи от развитието на гръцкия език и отразени в НГЕ като синхронно състояние на формообразуването при глаголната лексика. Настоящото изследване имаше за цел да обобщи тези морфологични и фонологични средства, като съзнателно избегне традиционното обвързване в образуването между активната и меди- опасивната основа за СВ. Предприетият тук подход към езиковите дадености в новогръцки е много полезен в обучението по НГЕ като чужд, особено при обучаеми, които нямат познания за диахронията на НГЕ. Класификацията на видообразуващите средства в НГЕ представлява изходен материал за разработването на система от упражнения и помагала по глаголна морфология на новогръцкия език, които по един съвременен и опростен начин да подпомагат обучаемите в усвояването на трудната новогръцка глаголна морфология.

Indonesian has three morphemes that are commonly used to express futurity, namely 'akan', 'mau', and 'pasti'. I argue that for certain speakers, the meanings of these three morphemes all contain a future modal, and that two of the morphemes (mau and pasti) each additionally include as part of their meaning a different aspectual operator (progressive-like and generic-like respectively) affecting the temporal argument of the accessibility relation of the modal. These combinations of aspect and a future modal I will call “aspectualized futures.” Throughout, I compare the Indonesian future forms with those in English: 'will' and 'be going to'. I propose that be going to is aspectually similar to 'mau', while 'will' is ambiguous between an 'akan' reading and a 'pasti' reading. I discuss as well a slightly different dialect of Indonesian in which the meanings of 'akan' and 'mau' are different.

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.

The aim of this book is to give the first large-scale typological investigation of pluractionality in the languages of the world. Pluractionality is defined as the morphological modification of the verb to express a plurality of situations that can additionally involve a plurality of participants and/or spaces. Based on a 246-language sample, the main characteristics of pluractionality are described and discussed throughout the book. Firstly, a description of the functions that pluractional markers cross-linguistically express is presented and the relationships occurring among them are explained through the semantic map model. Then, the marking strategies that languages display to express such functions are illustrated and some issues concerning the formal identification are briefly discussed as well. The typological generalizations are corroborated showing how pluractional markers work in three specific languages (Akawaio, Beja, Maa). In conclusion, the theoretical conceptualization of pluractionality is discussed referring to the Radical Construction Grammar approach.

L'article est centré sur la notion de «contingence actionnelle» qui est conçue comme un raffinement des classifications actionnelles (ou des «types de procès») existantes. Il est proposé de distinguer entre les classes «primaires» (dont les états, les processus et les événements) qui se veulent universelles et sont fondées sur les critères sémantiques, reproduisant, d'une façon modifiée, la classification vendlerienne, foncièrement syntaxique à l'origine, -et les classes «secondaires» ou «dérivées», qui relèvent plutôt des particularités de l'organisation grammaticale d'un système verbal donné. C'est pour établir l'inventaire des classes secondaires que la notion de contingence actionnelle s'avère particulièrement utile. Par exemple, un événement E («primaire») peut être traité, au niveau des classes secondaires, comme un «engagement de processus P» (s'il s'agit des dérivés inchoatifs) ou bien comme un «final de processus P» (s'il s'agit des dérivés terminatifs), etc.; toujours est-il que, dans ce cas-là, l'événement E et le processus P représentent les situations contingentes. L'application de la notion de contingence peut se rendre efficace surtout dans l'étude typologique des systèmes aspectuels.

The personal voice of Jim McCawley can often be heard in his academic prose, but his writings provide merely a hint of the living presence of the man, which survives now only in the memories of those who were fortunate enough to have known him. He always seemed to be getting fifty per cent more out of life than anyone else, and perhaps he was. The genius of the man is amply exhibited in his works, but the rest—the sartorial eccentricities, the strident walk, the gestures (the rolled-back eyes and thrown-back head; the quavering, deictic finger), the stutter (in English, but surprisingly absent from the several other languages he spoke), the Scottish/American accent, the sheer good humour—is gone with the stack of woks on the kitchen floor, the music scores in the coat pocket, the briefcase full of offprints. We are left to console ourselves for the incomprehensible loss of the man with the brilliance of the works he left us. They're not enough, but they'll have to do.