Resolving the “present perfective paradox”: Incompatible categories

Malchukov, Andrej L.

doi:10.1075/la.148.02mal

In:Cross-linguistic Semantics of Tense, Aspect, and Modality
Edited by Lotte Hogeweg, Helen de Hoop and Andrej L. Malchukov
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 148] 2009
► pp. 13–32

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Incompatible categories

Resolving the “present perfective paradox”

Andrej L. Malchukov | MPI EVA, Leipzig, Institute of Linguistic Studies, Saint Petersburg

Published online: 30 November 2009

https://doi.org/10.1075/la.148.02mal

In this paper I propose a general approach to the study of constraints on cooccurrence of grammatical categories and present one case study of a functionally infelicitous combination from the domain of TAM categories, the present perfective. It is argued that constraints on co-occurrence of particular categories can be accounted for in terms of local markedness and markedness hierarchies. This approach lends itself naturally for formalization in Optimality Theoretic terms. It was further shown that both production optimization (OT syntax) and comprehension optimization (OT semantics) is needed to model syntagmatic interaction of grammatical categories.

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