Perspectives On Aspect

This book offers both a retrospective view on how theories of aspectuality have developed over the past 30 years, and presents current, new directions of aspectuality research. The articles in this book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of the following languages: English and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nahk-Daghestanian languages.

This book presents new perspectives on the study of Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics. Based on the international Workshop on Aspect and Modality in Chinese, the book includes the latest research findings in the field to make them available not only to specialists in Classical and Buddhist Chinese, but also to researchers and students of general linguistics and of the universals of language. It also discusses different aspects of the AM (Aspect-Modality) and the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Modality) system of Chinese. It provides a comprehensive overview of both of the universally related systems of aspect and modality. The first part of the book focuses on aspectual features of Chinese; these include basic studies on the syntactic representation of the aspectual structure of the verb phrase in Archaic Chinese, the aspectual function of different object constructions and their development, temporal features of the verb phrase, and the aspectual functions of no minalization processes. The second part includes articles highlighting different aspects of the modal system or the interplay between tense, aspect and modality in Chinese, including a survey on the history of studies on modality in Chinese and the modal and temporal aspectual/markers indicating future meanings, a specialized study on modal deontic verbs in the Buddhist Vinaya texts, the modal function of rhetorical questions in Buddhist Chinese, and a study on the diachronic development of the aspectual and modal system in Chinese.

The volume proposes original semantic analyses on grammatical aspect, dealing with some less studied forms coding aspect, revisiting or challenging certain conventionalized views on aspectual categories and shedding light on interactions between aspect and modality, another multifaceted semantic category.

A key new textbook which is part of a new series co-published with The Open University Written to be used in conjunction with its counterpart in the Teaching in the Secondary School series. Between them they address both the theoretical and practical issues in science teaching Examples of good practice are underpinned by reference to research and other literature

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 empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus, some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods, while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past-tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine-grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well-known Indo-European languages (e.g. French, German, English, Spanish) and also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian, Estonian, Avar, Andi, Tagalog) provides a valuable cross-linguistic perspective.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: This paper aims at a closer examination of aspectuality in English. It illustrates the importance of a category which has only scarcely received attention in the study of the English language (cf. Binnick 1991). When it comes to the analysis of situations, the focus is on the verbal category 'tense,' which relates the temporal location of the situation to other points in time. The category of 'aspect' is closely connected to tense, because it provides important information about the internal temporal structure of situations. Nonetheless it is often less familiar to speakers of the English language, referring to, among others, the works of Comrie (1967), Brinton (1988), Binnick (1991) and Kortmann (1991). According to their studies, English lacks formal markers of aspect, whereas the realization of tense in English is quite obvious and thus much discussed. 1.1 Central Questions Based on Binnick's (1991) description of 'aspectuality,' it is necessary to clarify this concept in detail. The central questions for this examination will be: 1. How can aspectuality be inferred from utterances when English lacks aspectual markers? 2. Are there systematic approaches that are concerned with the interaction of 'aspect' and 'Aktionsart' as defined by Comrie (1976) and Vendler (1957)? 3. In which ways do aspectual properties influence or change the semantic meaning of utterances and why? 4. What are the combination options of aspectual perspectives and properties and are there any restrictions consequent on the interaction of different aspectual values? This paper serves not just to answer these questions, but also tries to differentiate between the various subcategories of aspectuality,' which are in general difficult to distinguish properly. [...]

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research, BIR 2014, held in Lund, Sweden, in September 2014. Overall, 71 submissions were rigorously reviewed by 55 members of the Program Committee representing 22 countries. As a result, 27 full papers have been selected for publication in this volume. The papers cover many aspects of business information research and have been organized in topical sections on: business, people, and systems; business and information systems development; and contextualized evaluation of business informatics.