Documenting and Classifying Aspectual Classes Across Languages

Bar-el, Leora

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190212339.003.0004

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…However, cross-linguistic studies (e.g. Ebert 1995;Bickel 1996Bickel , 1997Tatevosov 2002;Botne 2003), show that different languages can conceptualize nearest translational equivalents quite differently, and increasing evidence shows that in a number of languagesmaybe even the majority -Vendler's ontology is insufficient to capture significant properties of actional systems (see also Bar-el 2015).…”

Section: Actionality In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Notes on actionality in two Nguni languages of South Africa

Crane¹,

Persohn

2021

sal

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This paper presents some key findings of studies of actionality and the verbal grammar–lexicon interface in two Nguni Bantu languages of South Africa, Xhosa and Southern Ndebele. We describe interactions between grammatical tense marking (and other sentential bounding elements) and lexical verb types, arguing for the salience of inchoative verbs, which lexically encode a resultant state, and, in particular, a sub-class of inchoative verbs, biphasal verbs, which encode both a resultant state and the “coming-to-be” phase leading up to that state. We further discuss other important features of actional classes in Xhosa and Southern Ndebele, including topics such as the role of participant structure and the relative importance of cross-linguistically prominent distinctions such as that between Vendlerian activities and accomplishments. Although differences between Xhosa and Southern Ndebele are evident both in the behaviour of individual tense-aspect forms and in the interpretive possibilities of specific verbs, the general patterns are quite similar. This similarity suggests that the patterns are likely to extend to other Nguni languages, as well, and that cross-linguistic comparison of particular lexical items across these languages are both feasible and likely to bear fruit.

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Section: Actionality In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Notes on actionality in two Nguni languages of South Africa

Crane¹,

Persohn

2021

sal

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“…Despite the centrality of actionality, careful typological surveys of actional systems have been rare (but see e.g. Bar-el 2015;Bickel 1997;Nichols 2018;Van Valin 2006). As a result, our knowledge of the distributional typology of actionality systems is still fairly limited.…”

Section: Background and Motivationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: the role of the lexicon in actionality

Crane¹,

Nichols

Persohn

2021

STUF - Language Typology and Universals

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Actionality (also referred to by labels such as “lexical aspect” or “aktionsart”) is the semantic dimension that encodes the constituent phases and boundaries of situations. Despite its central role in aspectual interpretation, careful language-specific descriptions and typological surveys of actional systems have been rare thus far. In this introduction, we describe the steps that lead to the compilation of the present special issue. We discuss several theoretical and methodological challenges that both field linguists and typologists face when investigating actional systems in the languages of the world and we point out some of the important insights to be gained from such endeavors. We then proceed to give an overview of the individual and varied contributions that make up this issue.

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“…In recent literature on actionality from a cross-linguistic perspective, it has been pointed out that the phase structure, i.e. the temporal profile, of a particular state-of-affairs is language-specific (Tatevosov 2002: 324;Botne 2003b;Bar-el 2015). One case in point is the so-called "bi-phasal" (Ebert 1995), "ingressive-stative" (Bickel 1997: 124-127) or "inceptive-stative" (Tatevosov 2002: 382-384) phase structure, in which a transitional "entryinto-a-state" phase is part of (or "profiled in") the temporal structure.…”

Section: A (7)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The diachronic semantics of the Dissociative Past Completive construction in the Kikongo Language Cluster (Bantu)

2018

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This article aims to give a semantic study of the reflexes of one specific tense/aspect form, namely the so-called*-a-B-aconstruction, in a cluster of about 40-odd Kikongo language varieties spoken in a wide area around the mouth of the Congo River in Central Africa. We first present a detailed analysis of the multiple uses of these cognate constructions at sentence level, in order to arrive at a formal and semantic reconstruction for the most recent common ancestor of the Kikongo Language Cluster, namely Proto-Kikongo. The analysis departs from the overall aspectual meaning of the linguistic expression in which the tense-aspect construction is used. Therefore, we also take into consideration the contribution of different aspectual tiers, such as lexical and grammatical aspect, adverbials and taxis constructions. Through the discussion of the multiple uses of the-a-B-aconstruction, we argue that its overall meaning is complex, combining both temporal and aspectual semantics. It is furthermore shown that a lexical-aspect distinction between states-of-affairs with transitional versus non-transitional temporal structure is crucial in order to understand the various uses of the-a-B-aconstruction. Methodologically, the formal and semantic reconstruction to Proto-Kikongo are based on a thorough comparison of a multitude of existing data sources, some of which several centuries old, as well as original fieldwork. This bottom-up approach has rarely been pursued over the past half century in Bantu grammatical reconstructions.

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Documenting and Classifying Aspectual Classes Across Languages

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Notes on actionality in two Nguni languages of South Africa

Notes on actionality in two Nguni languages of South Africa

Introduction: the role of the lexicon in actionality

The diachronic semantics of the Dissociative Past Completive construction in the Kikongo Language Cluster (Bantu)

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