Cross-linguistic semantics of tense aspect and modality pdf merge

Crosslinguistic views on tense, aspect and modality. The modal verbs can and may in english and spanish. Aspect marking and modality in child vietnamese jennie tran and kamil deen university of hawai. Turning to the semantics of tense and aspect, the same holds for 1d. Tense and aspect stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Temporal interpretation and crosslinguistic variation publish. At the same time, it provides fresh impetus to more general linguistic issues such as grammaticalization, colloquialization, or the interplay between sociolinguistic and syntactic constraints. This dissertation offers a grammatical description and analysis of manda n.

In recent years, we have witnessed, on the one hand, an increased interest in crosslinguistic data in formal semantic studies, and, on the other hand, an increased concern for semantic issues in language typology. You might shouldnt say that 53 the second class of english auxiliaries, the modals, is unique among related languages. Tenseaspect morphology in the advanced english l2 variety. Macmahon is professor of phonetics at the university of glasgow. In crosslinguistic semantics of tense, aspect, and modality ed. The degree semantics parameter and crosslinguistic. The author starts by considering what modality is and how it relates to and differs from subjectivity. The topic of mood and modality mod is a difficult aspect of language description because among other reasons the inventory of modal meanings is not stable across languages, moods do not map neatly from one language to another, modality may be realized morphologically or by freestanding words such as adverbs, and it interacts in complex. Only a small, but growing, number of formal semanticists are involved in descriptive and typological linguistics involving languages from other continents and some promising work has already been done on topics such as quantification, number, tense, aspect, and modality.

Semantic construction for nominal expressions in crosslinguistic perspective emily bender, markus eggy, and michael tepper university of washington and yuniversit at des saarlandes 1 introduction we discuss a case of typological variation which potentially constrains the design of the syntaxsemantics interface. Event semantics with continuations for incremental. The majority of these studies find that nativelike temporal and aspectual systems are attainable for. Modality in contemporary english roberta facchinetti. Its approach is broadly functional typological but makes frequent reference to work in formal semantics by scholars such as angelika kratzer and paul portner.

The syntax of evidentials in azeri, bulgarian, and persian. Information structure in russian sign language and sign language of the netherlands. A crosslinguistic, crossmodality study elena benedicto, pinhsi chen, kwaku oseitutu and neda taherkh ani. Tense, aspect and modality categories in romani, stuf. I english language the years work in english studies. Sabine iatridou, elena anagnostopoulou, and roumyana. The interdependency of tense and aspect temporality is an essential feature of sentences in most languages and its grammatical expression through morphology is obligatory in many languages.

Grammatical elements such as mood, modality, and negation were included in amr 1. This article is written in a very confusing way for example, there is the sentence the distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect, usually relating to situation aspect rather than viewpoint aspect, when neither the term situational aspect nor viewpoint aspect had ever been brought up anywhere. The crosslinguistic variation in the gestural representation of the swing event has the same pattern as the variation in the linguistic packaging of information about the event. Pdf it has been shown that, at least in certain languages, tense is represented in. These verbs, listed by palmer as can, could, dare, may, might, must, need, ought, shall, should, will, and would,4 lack the flexibility exhibited by nonmodal have and be. Our study is rooted into the longlasting tradition of crosslinguistic functional. The book proposes a new formal framework that models crosslinguistic and crossconstructional variation in noun modification constructions. In english, where there is a readily accessible linguistic means to package the change of location and the arcshaped trajectory, speakers gestures represent change. In cinque 1999, some crosslinguistic evidence bearing on clausal grammatical encodings was presented to this effect. The notion of temporality taken in a broad sense covers both temporal and aspectual linguistic elements. Traditional approaches, current challenges and new tools. Electronic publications 80974 freely accessible full text publications plus those not yet available due to embargo. The paper discusses the universality of the finaloverfinal condition fofc.

Crosslinguistic semantics of tense, aspect, and modality edited. Semantic construction for nominal expressions in cross. Particularly investigating the questions of whether tense plays a role in malayalam and the nature of finiteness in malayalam and dravidian. And nicolle concludes that what defines grammaticalization is the addition of procedural information to the semantics of an expression. D 1975, studies in the syntax of relative and comparative clauses, ph. In 5, l is the type for events, s is the type of situations, p is a variable. We showed that a uni ed syntactic account of evidentiality is possible in azeri, bulgarian, and persian, where evidentiality interacts with tense and aspect. Description most formal semantic and pragmatic work is done on indo european languages, especially english. Rather, he claims, the hebrew yiqtol conjugation can be a tense and. Tense, aspect and coercion in a crosslinguistic perspective. A crosslinguistic perspective this book deals with the issue of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in modality from a synchronic. First, let us clarify some aspects of the modal semantics we propose in 5. Crosslinguistically viable treatment of tense and aspect in.

The syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of japanese and chinese linguistic insights. The english modal may, for example, can either occur in the scope of negation, as shown in the paraphrase in 1b, or have negation in its scope 1c. The framework it offers enables readers to explicitly map word structure to syntactic structure, providing new insights into, and impacting upon, all current theoretical models of grammar. Introduction this paper explores how lexical semantics can be approached by direct crosslinguistic comparison of contextually. This paper argues that the challenge from sfps is inconclusive since the evidence for the head status of sfps is lacking. It shows that while the omission of aspect markers is the predominant error, errors of commission are. One problem faced by pargram was that the semantics of tenseaspect could not necessarily. This book brings together formal semanticists with a crosslinguistic perspective andor those working on lesserknown languages, and typologists interested in semantic theory, to discuss semantic variation in the specific domain of tense, aspect, and moodmodality. It has been proposed that sentencefinal particles sfps in chinese may invalidate the universality of fofc.

Introduction and rolecentered approaches to lexical semantic representation part i. Review of crosslinguistic semantics of tense, aspect, and modality, eds. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a pdf of a single chapter of a title in. Aspect languages languages differ with regard to which semantic dimensions tense, aspect, tense and aspect they grammatically encode in form of spezial morphemes, auxiliaries etc. Because aspect interacts with tense, modality, and other linguistic systems see dahl 1985, and because it functions at the level of discourse to some extent see hopper 1982, it is challenging. This book offers original theoretical accounts and a wealth of descriptive information concerning modality in presentday english. Her publications are on tense, aspect, and conditionals.

Tense, aspect and modality categories in romani tense, aspect and modality categories in romani matras, yaron 20010601 00. Modality and language modality is a category of linguistic meaning having to do with the expression of. The degree semantics parameter and crosslinguistic variation the standard degree analysis of gradability in english holds that the function of degree morphology, such as the comparative, measure phrases, and degree adverbs, is to bind a degree variable located in. Crosslinguistic variation in imperfectivity springerlink. Overlap in the classification of verb forms by semantic class and grounding status. If the temporal markers in some languages are actually nominal aspect. This book is a crosslinguistic exploration of semantic and functional change in modal markers. This perspective on modality allows for the integration of covert modality as well as peripheral instances of modality in neglected domains such as the modality of insufficieny, of attitudinality, or neglected domains such as modality and illocutionary force in finite vs. This short note on discourse structure completes our article on tense and aspect. Pdf annotation of tense and aspect semantics for sentential amr. This book brings together formal semanticists with a crosslinguistic perspective andor those working on lesserknown languages, and typologists interested in semantic theory, to discuss semantic variation in the specific domain of tense, aspect, and mood modality. The great bulk of the discussion in the literature concerns epistemic and deonticroot modality. Issues in the semanticspragmatics interface current research in the semantics pragmatics interface current research in the semantics pragmatics interface.

Request pdf modality, subjectivity, and semantic change. Crosslinguistic variation in the semantics of comparatives. Modality and language mit massachusetts institute of. This item appears in the following collections faculty of arts 21715. However, only few studies combine semantic and typological research for a particular semantic domain such as the papers in bach et al. In the standard language, they are restricted to finite uses yet show no overt agreement morphology.

Possession and dativelocative alternation with hany babu m. If you had a personal account on the old platform, click here. As with nongenerative studies, the main focus of these generative studies is the acquisition of tense and aspect distinctions. After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empiricallygrounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks.

The universal structure of categories by martina wiltschko. Crosslinguistic comparison and experimental evidence from basque. Pancheva 3 the theory defended here is a weak version of the xn theory 2. Topics of investigation include compounding, verb complementation, tense and aspect, as well as a range of word order phenomena, such as passive constructions, focusfronting, and right. This might be linked to the highly grammaticalized form these modal markers take in many languages, as modal verbs or auxiliaries.