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