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Tense and Aspect Morphology: Course Instructor: Veronica Tomescu

The document discusses various topics related to tense and aspect morphology including: 1. Structuralism views language as a formal system of signs and sees units as defined in relation to other units in the system. 2. Generative grammar sees language as an empirical science and focuses on the language faculty of the mind which allows for linguistic creativity and learnability through a finite set of rules. 3. Morphology examines the structure of words, including inflectional affixes which indicate categories like number, tense and aspect, and are organized into paradigms. Tense relates events to speech time while aspect provides information about the internal stages of a situation.

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59 views18 pages

Tense and Aspect Morphology: Course Instructor: Veronica Tomescu

The document discusses various topics related to tense and aspect morphology including: 1. Structuralism views language as a formal system of signs and sees units as defined in relation to other units in the system. 2. Generative grammar sees language as an empirical science and focuses on the language faculty of the mind which allows for linguistic creativity and learnability through a finite set of rules. 3. Morphology examines the structure of words, including inflectional affixes which indicate categories like number, tense and aspect, and are organized into paradigms. Tense relates events to speech time while aspect provides information about the internal stages of a situation.

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TSQNOG
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Tense and aspect morphology

course instructor: Veronica Tomescu


Chomsky (1988): Pinker (1984)
• inventory of lexical items
• linguistic • language • rules that allow speakers
creativity instinct to construct from the
• poverty of input lexical items an infinity of
structures

Chomsky (2005): 3 factors : Principles and


1. genetic endowment: Parameters
language faculty – (Chomsky 1981)
identical for all humans • Universal
2. experience: variation Grammar = set
of principles +
3. language independent set of
principles (data analysis, parameters
computation)
What is grammar?
grammar = a model of the speaker’s internalized
language
Traditional grammars
• notional
• normative, prescriptive
• diachronic
• language = collection of items
Structuralism
• descriptive
• synchronic
• spoken language: corpus
• holistic view of language as a system of
elements
• units = value in relation to other items
Structuralism
• formal definitions
Fries 1957:
verb = the word class whose members occur in
the context: to_, _ing, _s, _ed
Structuralism
• language = formal system of signs
• Saussure: language is a system based on the
opposition of its units
• Hjelmslev (1943): anchoring items relatively in
respect to other objects similarly defined
• hierarchical levels of language have isomorphic
organization
• structuralist grammars: deductive
corpus => rules
Generative grammar
• empirical , Galilean inductive science
• language faculty
• mind: not tabula rasa; but a complex modular
organ (Fodor 1983)

1. linguistic creativity
2. learnability of grammars => finite set of rules
The morpheme
I parked the car.
I park-ed [t] the car.
painted [id]
cleaned [d]

-> allomorphs (phonologically conditioned)


= a set of morphs are allomorphs of the same
morpheme if they are in complementary
distribution
• A and B are in complementary distribution in
case A never occurs in any of the contexts of B
and the other way around
• grammatical conditioning :
I drove the car.
Forms which have a common semantic
distinctiveness and an identical phonemic form in
all their occurrences constitute a single morpheme.
dancer, flier ≠wider

different phonemic form = if distribution of formal


differences is phonologically definable : allomorphs
(Nida 1948)
• complexity of word structure is due to two
types of morphological operations: inflection
and derivation
• Inflectional variation: grammatical markers for
number, gender, case, person, tense, aspect,
mood and comparison
• Derivation: the formation of new words
Inflectional affixes
• organized in paradigms
• closed sets
• in complementary distribution

park/parks/parked
go/goes/went/gone -> suppletion
defective paradigm: can, trousers
Lexical categories Functional categories

N, V, A, Av determiners, inflection, degree,


complementizers, quantifiers
P
substantive content grammatical function
open classes closed classes

assign Theta-role typically combine with a


specific lexical class:
e.g. the N, to V
c(ategory)-selection
Inflection
• the functional domain of the verb = inflection
• inflection = an umbrella term for Tense,
Agreement, Aspect, Mood, Voice
Tense
• deictic category: oriented towards the time of
the speaker, it relates situations to Speech
Time and orders them by the relations of:
simultaneity, anteriority, posteriority
• represents the chronological order of events
in time as perceived by the speaker
Aspect
• not a deictic category
• informs about the size of the situation, about
its internal stages, about the quality of the
situation

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