Temporal Properties of Persian and English | ||
| The International Journal of Humanities | ||
| Article 3, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 31-54 PDF (151.89 K) | ||
| Author | ||
| Ali Akbar Jabbari* | ||
| Yazd University | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This study compares and contrasts tense and inherent aspect in English and Persian lan-guage from a semantic and syntactic point of view. The aspectual verb system in both English and Persian are semantically interpreted alike. However, in Persian a group of stative verbs are grammaticalized by the imperfective obligatory morpheme mi-, while in English all sta-tive verbs perfective. Furthermore, while in Persian all accomplishment verbs can be shifted into activity verbs by deleting their direct object markers (i.e. by means of noun-incorporation), in English accomplishment verbs cannot be shifted into activity verbs2 . Fi-nally, while English has six tense forms such as present, present perfect, past, past perfect, future, and future perfect, Persian has only five tense forms; it lacks future perfect tense and present perfect tense is being used instead. Inherent aspect and tense are syntactically instan-tiated in both English and Persian. The model that has been followed is based on Arad's (1996) and Borer's (1994) views that the interface between the lexicon (i.e. meaning) and syn-tax is aspectually determined. Based on event-predicated based approach, telic events are projected by the aspectual projection of measurer where accusative case is also checked, at-elic events are projected by the aspectual projection of originator, where an agent interpreta-tion is determined, and non-dynamic situations are projected by neither the aspectual project tion of measurer nor originator; they are base-generator in the VP, because they are aspectually contentless. However, independently of these factors tense is uniform ally projected in the IP. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| tense & aspect; perfective/imperfective in English & Persian; dynamic & static aspect | ||
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