The meaning of the Russian perfective-imperfective opposition is usually characterized in terms such as ‘the situation is seen in its totality vs. not in its totality, with a boundary vs. without a boundary’, and similar ones. These characterizations, while expressing important intuitions, fail on a number of grounds. Aspects are purely temporal relations between the time at which some situation obtains and the time for which an assertion is made by the utterance which describes this situation. This leads to simple and precise definitions of the two Russian aspects. The intuitive characterizations familiar from the literature follow in a natural way from these definitions.

Moribund dialects threatened by the encroachment of healthy varieties of the same language have been overlooked in establishing the language endangerment canon. Endangered varieties of languages as safe as even English exhibit structures not found in mainstream language varieties and so are an invaluable resource to scholars of language variation—and, indeed, of language patterning in general. Further, the insights into language variation and change that we gain from studying moribund dialects inform our study of the types of changes that characterize endangered and dying languages. Our arguments are based on the examination of Ocracoke English, a dialect of American English which is spoken on Ocracoke Island, located off the coast of North Carolina and inhabited by about 600 year-round residents. This dialect developed in relative isolation from mainstream varieties of American English but is now threatened by encroachment from mainland dialects as the island becomes more accessible to the outside world. Using the case of the Ocracoke production of the /ay/ diphthong as , we present linguistic and sociolinguistic evidence that Ocracoke English is indeed an endangered dialect. We also describe the development of a community-based preservation program that parallels the type of proactive programs that have been implemented thus far only for endangered language situations.

Numerous attempts have been made to place restrictions on the occurrence of formally definite NPs in English existential there-sentences. The wide range of definite NPs found in this construction, however, precludes any (noncircular) characterization of such a definiteness effect based on linguistic form alone. Nonetheless, previous functional analyses of definites in there-sentences have also failed to account for all of the problematic data in a unified way. We present an account of existential there-sentences in which the postverbal NP is required to represent a hearer-new entity; based on a large corpus of naturally occurring data, we identify five types of formally definite yet hearer-new NPs that may felicitously occur in there-sentences. The alleged restriction against definite NPs in there-sentences is shown to be the result of a mismatch between the cognitive status to which definiteness is sensitive and that to which the postverbal position in there-sentences is sensitive.

This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in three children acquiring English. It was found that (1) children start using past inflections predominantly with achievement verbs, and progressive inflections with activity verbs; and (2) the same distributional bias is found in the speech by caretakers addressed to children. The result shows that despite claims to the contrary, early development of tense-aspect morphology is strongly influenced by the inherent aspect of the verbs, and suggests that the pattern of the development should be attributed to input and to prototype formation by children.

We support the theory of level ordering by demonstrating, on the basis of productive morphology and phonology, that Turkish has four lexical levels. The evidence, however, motivates modifications in the way level ordering is implemented. The first is the principle of Level Economy, according to which a form is subject to the phonology only of those levels at which it is morphologically derived. The second is level prespecification, which exempts a root entirely from early lexical levels. Level Economy accounts for systematic exceptionality, while level prespecification accounts for idiosyncratic exceptionality, to the entire phonology of given levels. These mechanisms yield analyses of facts in Turkish that prove intractable in other theories. Both rely on a structural, rather than a temporal, approach to level ordering.