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MatrixDoc_TenseAspectMood
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This document explains how to fill out the Tense, Aspect, and Mood page of the Grammar Matrix Customization questionnaire and presents background information on the Tense, Aspect and Mood library of the Grammar Matrix Customization System (Bender et al., 2002; Bender and Flickinger, 2005; Bender et al., 2010). General instructions on using the questionnaire can be found here.
The standard reference for the Tense, Aspect, and Mood Library and its implementations is Poulson 2012. The full reference and .bib entry can be found here.
The Tense, Aspect, and Mood page allows you to specify a range of values for each of these features in your language either by choosing pre-existing values or creating your own values. This page is divided into two sections: Semantic Features (semantic features of tense/aspect/mood) and Syntactic Feature (verb forms). If you need to define additional features for Tense/Aspect/Mood (TAM) in your language (??? such as for the arbitrary or quasi-semantic verb classes ???), you can define these features on the Other Features page.
The Tense, Aspect, and Mood library allows you to specify the range of values for the features [TENSE tense], [ASPECT aspect], [SITUATION situation], [MOOD mood], and [FORM form] that will be available elsewhere in the customization system and in the resulting grammar (see more on that in the Analyses section below).
This section deals with the semantic features of TAM, namely Tense, Aspect (Viewpoint and Situation), and Mood.
For both TENSE and ASPECT, user can select among common values and/or define additional ones. MOOD values are purely user-defined. These features are then available on the Lexicon and Morphology pages such that individual lexical items and lexical rules can constrain them. In addition, the Tense, Aspect and Mood page houses the feature FORM, which is required if there are auxiliary verbs in the grammar.
1. Tense
In this section please define TENSE values and their subtypes (if applicable) for your language. You can either choose from the Tense values pre-defined for you by The Matrix Customization system ("Select among common hierarchy elements" option) or you can create your own Tense values ("Build your own TENSE hierarchy" option).
If the values provided below are sufficient to describe the Tense system in your language, please choose "Select among common hierarchy elements" option and select from the common possibilities of the tense values below as applicable to your language. For each option you select, please add a subtype if applicable:
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1). present
2). past
3). future
4). nonpast (note: If present and/or future are also selected they are assumed to be subtypes of nonpast.)
5). nonfuture (note: If present and/or past are also selected they are assumed to be subtypes of nonfuture.)
If pre-defined values provided on this page are not sufficient to describe the TENSE hierarchy in your language, you can build your own TENSE hierarchy by defining tense values and their supertypes as applicable to your language. This option is especially useful for the languages with deeper tense hierarchies, such as Amerindian language Kiksht. Kiksht tense system is divided into non-past and past, with the past tense being subdivided into remote (further subdivided into early-remote and late-remote tenses), far (further subdivided into early-far and late-far tenses), middle, and near tenses (Comrie 1985, cited in Poulson 2011). Clearly, languages like Kiksht with deep tense hierarchies require a user to build a more elaborate tense hierarchy than the one already provided by Matrix customization system. If your language also requires creating new values/supertypes in the tense hierarchy, please choose the option "Build your own TENSE hierarchy" on the bottom of TENSE section and enter all tenses and their supertypes existing in your language.
Regardless of which option you choose (pre-defined tense hierarchy vs. building your own tense hierarchy), the number of values that you can enter for Tense names and their subtypes in questionnaire is unlimited.
2. Aspect
In this section please define ASPECT values existing in your language. As with Tense, you can either choose from the aspect values pre-defined for you by The Matrix Customization system or you can create your own aspect hierarchy.
This section is divided into two parts, Viewpoint aspect and Situation aspect.
(1). Viewpoint Aspect
Viewpoint aspect (or 'grammatical aspect') describes the situation from a particular viewpoint, dividing it into endpoints and stages. It is usually marked by verbal inflection or by presence of auxiliary with (possibly inflected) complement. The most common viewpoint aspect values are Perfective (a view including two endpoints) and Imperfective (a view not including endpoints). If your language only has Perfective and Imperfective values, they are covered by the option with pre-defined aspect values provided by Matrix Customization system. In this case please select the "Create a hierarchy consisting of just the values perfective and imperfective as subtypes of aspect" option.
If your language uses other and/or additional aspect subcategories (for example, post-inchoative, semi-perfective, etc.), you can build you own aspect hierarchy by adding aspect names and their supertypes using provided drop-down menu.
If your language does not have a viewpoint aspect, please skip this section entirely and move to the next section Situation Aspect.
(2). Situation Aspect
Situation aspect (also referred to as 'lexical aspect,' 'inner aspect,' 'inherent aspect' or sometimes 'Aktionsart,' describes the type of the situation, particularly in terms of its temporal properties. The most common subcategories of Situation aspect are: States, Activities, Achievements and Accomplishments (Vendler 1957). Situation aspect can be expressed through the meaning of the verb (lexical quality) or by presence of overt morphological markers, which is implemented in Grammar Matrix. However, if situation aspect is compositionally derived (in the case when situation aspect depends on qualities of verbal arguments or sentential adjuncts, etc.), it is not yet implemented by Matrix Customization system yet.
Unlike Tense and Viewpoint Aspect, there are no pre-defined values for Situation Aspect in Matrix Customization system. So, if situation aspect exists in your language, please build your own Situation Aspect hierarchy by adding situation aspect values for the feature [SITUATION situation], as well as their supertypes using the drop-down menu in this section. If situation aspect does not exist in your language, please skip this section entirely and move to the next section Mood.
3. Mood
This section is designed to help you define Mood and Modality system in general as applicable to your language. Modality roughly describes the opinions or attitudes of the speaker, with most common values being Subjunctive and Indicative. If your language has only these two subcategories of Mood, please choose the pre-defined MOOD values available in Matrix Customization system by checking the "Create a hierarchy consisting of just the values subjunctive and indicative as subtypes of mood" option.
Otherwise, you can either skip this section entirely or build your own Mood hierarchy by adding mood types and their supertypes as applicable to your language. Please note that if you choose the option of building your own Mood hierarchy, this will override the pre-defined values binary Subjunctive/Indicative option above.
The only syntactic feature this section deals with is the verb form, distinguishing finite verb forms from nonfinite verb forms. The main difference between these two verb forms is that finite verbs can head stand-alone clauses, while nonfinite verb forms cannot head stand-alone clauses.
If on the Word Order page you have indicated that your language contains auxiliaries, your starter grammar will have finite and nonfinite values of FORM. Even if your language does not use auxiliary verbs, but makes a syntactic distinction between finite and nonfinite verbs, please check the corresponding option: "My language has no auxiliaries but does make a syntactically relevant finite/non-finite distinction."
Often languages have subtypes of nonfinite verbs. For example, English has Infinitive, Past Participle, and Present participle as subtypes of nonfinite verbs. If this is the case in your language, please add the subtypes of finite and nonfinite verbs below.
If your language does not make any syntactic distinction between finite and nonfinite verbs, you can skip this section entirely and move to the next page Other Features
For more information on how to use the questionnaire to define values for TAM in your language, please refer to the Tense, Aspect, and Mood page in Matrix Customization.
For more information on the implementation of number in Grammar Matrix please refer to the section Analyses.
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The values you define for TAM will be available to use later in the customization system, (especially the Morphology and Lexicon pages?????)
The answers you provide on this page will determine the values available on the Lexicon page for the NUM feature (or the PERNUM feature, about which see the Person section of the questionnaire for more details or Person documentation page). Note that feature values defined on the lexicon and morphology libraries may affect the hierarchy of number. Underspecifications in the lexicon or morphosyntax will automatically be integrated in the hierarchy of number: you do not need to define these explicitly on the number page.
Unlike some well-understood grammatical phenomena that can be covered by pre-defined analyses in Matrix libraries, Tense, Aspect, and Mood are more complicated phenomena that vary tremendously from language to language and do not have an established terminology. A library with pre-defined analyses is not sufficient for such a complicated grammatical phenomenon. To allow user to have more flexibility for coverage of Tense, Aspect and Mood, Matrix Customization system uses a meta-modeling approach, enabling the user to define tense/aspect/mood values themselves instead of relying on a library with limited pre-defined analyses. For more information on the meta-modeling approach and its advantages please refer to Section 4.1 of Poulson 2011.
The Tense, Aspect and Mood library is partially described in Poulson 2011.
When you define tense, aspect, and mood hierarchies, your starter grammar will include the features [TENSE tense], [ASPECT aspect], [SITUATION situation], and [MOOD mood], with values based on the choices you make on the Tense, Aspect, and Mood customization page. TENSE, ASPECT, SITUATION, and MOOD are features of semantic INDEX. FORM, on the other hand, is a feature of syntactic HEAD and can be used to constrain auxiliary complement forms.
- [ This documentation is under construction. When it is more complete, this section should describe any modifications to or enhancements of this library that are either in progress or planned. ]
1. Need to broaden meta-modeling coverage. Right now it cannot accomodate all analyses (Poulson, 25)
2. More work is required in order to implement the compositionally derived situation aspect in the Matrix Customization system, which is not covered yet. At present, the coverage of situation aspect in the Matrix customization system is limited to the situation aspect that is expressed by inherent lexical qualities or overt morphological marking.
More on future goals from Laurie's work: "The most urgent need is for improvement to the process for dening lexical types and type hierarchies. The current implementation does not provide the user sufficient flexibility when dening type hierarchies resulting in a significant amount of duplicated eort when creating types. Questionnaire enhancement in this area is already underway. In addition, the Other Features page needs to be enhanced to allow a broader range of feature paths, thereby allowing other types of features to be defined. It might also be useful to add some pre-defined aspect feature value hierarchies to the questionnaire. It might be worth providing an option for a pre-dened perfective/imperfective viewpoint contrast. Likewise, it might be useful for some linguists to have the option to choose a pre-defined hierarchy of the situation aspect features: dynamic, durative and telic. This option may apply to a fairly limited number of languages or analyses but the effort to build a cross-classified hierarchy of these three values is not insignicant. Finally, some users might prefer binary features - while binary features are less useful for building analyses based on underspecification, they may have other advantages for a particular user."
Comrie, B. (1985). Tense. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press.
bibtex:
@book{Comrie:1985, author = {Bernard Comrie}, year = {1985}, title = {tense}, location = {tense}, publisher = {Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press}, }
Poulson, L. (2011). Meta-modeling of Tense and Aspect in a Cross-linguistic Grammar Engineering Platform. UW Working Papers in Linguistics, 28.
bibtex:
@article{Poulson:11, author = {Laurie Poulson}, year = {2011}, title = {Meta-modeling of Tense and Aspect in a Cross-linguistic Grammar Engineering Platform}, volume = {28} }
Vendler, Z. (1957). Verbs and times. The Philosophical Review, 66(2), 143-160. (Reprinted in a revised version in Vendler, 1967).
bibtex:
@book{Vendler:1957, author = {Zeno Vendler}, year = {1957}, title = {Verbs and times}, journal = {The Philosophical Review}, volume = {66}, issue = {2}, (????? - or it goes together with volume?????) ???? not sure where to put the reprinted info ???? }
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