[Lingtyp] passive and tense

Bohnemeyer, Juergen jb77 at buffalo.edu
Sat Nov 9 20:49:46 UTC 2019


Dear Pier Marco — That’s very interesting! But it doesn’t surprise me. First off, activities seem quite amorphous as a class in terms of their fine-grained aspectual properties. Secondly, many languages - including English, as opposed to Dutch and German - have dynamicity-based aspect marking, which overrides the telicity-based implicatures. These languages have grammaticalized progressive/imperfective marking, but restricted to dynamic descriptions. As a result, aspectually unmarked (e.g., simple past in English) dynamic descriptions are interpreted perfectively, whereas stative descriptions are interpreted imperfectively. It would be surprising (to me, anyway) if children weren’t influenced by these language-specific differences. But, I can’t begin to speculate whether that’s the case with Italian-learning children. — Best — Juergen

> On Nov 9, 2019, at 1:35 PM, Pier Marco Bertinetto <piermarco.bertinetto at sns.it> wrote:
> 
> Dear Juergen,
> the sort of correlations you point out have often been observed in adult speech and are in fact quite pervasive. Andersen and Shirai proposed their "prototype account",
> 
> Shirai, Yasuhiro & Roger W. Andersen. 1995. The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: A prototype account. Language 71. 743−762.
> 
> suggesting that children exaggerate somehow such correlations at the very initial stage of learning, before converging with adult usage. However, in
> 
> Bertinetto, Pier Marco; Lenci, Alessandro; Freiberger, Eva Maria; Noccetti, Sabrina; Agonigi, Maddalena 2015. The acquisition of tense and aspect in a morphology-sensitive framework. Data from Italian and Austrian German children. Linguistics 53,5. 1113-1168.
> 
> it was shown that the second correlation does not mirror the actual facts. It only works for stative verbs, while activities (although belonging to the atelic class) have a quite flexible behavior and show differences in the individual children. By lumping together statives and activities one loses the opportunity to have a neat picture of the children's acquisition strategies.
> Best
> Pier Marco
> 
> 
> 
> Il giorno sab 9 nov 2019 alle ore 19:05 Bohnemeyer, Juergen <jb77 at buffalo.edu> ha scritto:
> Dear Sergey et al. — In the developmental literature, there’s been much discussion of the following statistical patterns, supported by data from studies going back to the 1970s:
> 
> telic descriptions ~ past-time reference
> atelic descriptions ~ non-past-time reference
> 
> In Bohnemeyer & Swift (2004: 291-293), we argue that these correlations may be mediated by viewpoint aspect:
> 
> telic descriptions ~ perfective aspect ~ past-time reference
> atelic descriptions ~ imperfective aspect ~ non-past-time reference
> 
> We offer a Gricean account of the first part of these, the telicity-aspect patterns.
> 
> Now for several reasons, it also seems very plausible that passives would be more frequent with telic descriptions than with atelic ones. Mostly because passives would seem to tend to occur with topical, and thus predominantly (semantically) definite, themes.
> 
> (If any LingTypers are aware of adult language corpus data backing any of the above correlations up - or not! - I’d be grateful for references.)
> 
> Best — Juergen
> 
> Bohnemeyer, J. & M. D. Swift. (2004). Event realization and default aspect. Linguistics & Philosophy 27(3): 263-296.
> 
> > On Nov 9, 2019, at 12:36 PM, Sergey Lyosov <sergelyosov at inbox.ru> wrote:
> > 
> > Dear Ksenia,
> >  
> > thank you very much for the reference!
> >  
> > Sure, passive participles are often perfective, while A/S participles are cursive/imperfective/habitual. This is the case for most (perhaps all) Semitic languages.
> >  
> > Best wishes,
> >  
> > Sergey 
> >  
> > Пятница, 8 ноября 2019, 23:39 +02:00 от Ksenia Shagal <ksenia.shagal at gmail.com>:
> >  
> > Quite in line with Martin's work (1994), I discussed this (to a certain extent) in relation to asymmetry in participial systems. Participles specializing in S/A relativization (active) often refer to habitual events, while participles specializing in P(/S) relativization (passive or "absolutive") are mostly perfective or resultative. This seems relevant, since participles are a well-known source of ergativity in independent clauses, and in some languages they are involved in the formation of passive constructions. This topic is touched upon in sections 3.3.5, 7.2.1 and 7.5.2 of both the dissertation and the book:
> >  
> > Shagal, Ksenia. 2017. Towards a typology of participles. Helsinki: University of Helsinki doctoral dissertation. (https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/177418/Towardsa.pdf)
> > Shagal, Ksenia. 2019. Participles: A typological study. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
> >  
> > Best wishes,
> > Ksenia
> >  
> > On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 9:13 PM Peter Arkadiev <peterarkadiev at yandex.ru> wrote:
> > I'm wondering why I haven't got Sergey's original message... And this is not the first time I only see the replies to a posting on this list without receiving the original.
> > To Sergey's question, Emma Geniušienė reports that in the Lithuanian texts she has analysed, the passive is more than two times more frequently used in the *present* tense than in the past, see "Passive Constructions in Lithuanian" (Benjamins, 2016), p. 141.
> > 
> > Best regards,
> > 
> > Peter
> > 
> > -- 
> > Peter Arkadiev, PhD
> > Institute of Slavic Studies
> > Russian Academy of Sciences
> > Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow
> > peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
> > http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 08.11.2019, 20:33, "Haspelmath, Martin" <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>:
> > > Yes, I found this discussed by Comrie in 1981, and discussed it myself in 1994:
> > >
> > > Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Aspect and voice: Some reflections on perfect and passive. In Philip J. Tedeschi & Annie Zaenen (eds.), Tense and aspect (Syntax and Semantics 14), 65–78. New York: Academic Press.
> > > Haspelmath, Martin. 1994. Passive participles across languages. In Barbara Fox & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), Voice: Form and function (Typological Studies in Language), 151–177. Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tsl.27.08has. (https://zenodo.org/record/227097)
> > >
> > > But there must be more recent work about this as well.
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Martin
> > >
> > > On 08.11.19 18:19, Sergey Lyosov wrote:
> > >>  Dear colleagues
> > >>
> > >> Working with corpora of certain Semitic languages, I noticed that passive verb forms are much more frequent in the past tenses than in present and future tenses. This is also my impression of various languages with which I am familiar but have not studied their verbal systems. Does such cross-linguistic feature exist? If yes, how do we explain it?
> > >>
> > >> Best wishes,
> > >>
> > >> Sergey
> > >
> > > -- Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de) Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Kahlaische Strasse 10 D-07745 Jena   & Leipzig University Institut fuer Anglistik IPF 141199 D-04081 Leipzig
> > > ,
> > >
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> > --
> > Sergey Lyosov
> >  
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Juergen Bohnemeyer, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies 
Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science 
University at Buffalo 

Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus * Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 
Phone: (716) 645 0127 
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