Another paper just got published!
In this new paper, my colleagues and I argue that meanings like “it is dark now” can be categorized as perfect aspect (like Present Perfect in English) or already. In other words, this meaning can be similar to “it has gotten dark” (perfect) or “it is already dark now”.
We argue that perfect aspect and already are sufficient concepts in linguistic theory to describe the meaning of change of state in “it is dark now”. In the paper, we explain in more detail why there is no need to introduce a new linguistic category of iamitives, proposed by some linguists to explain the existence of meanings like “it is dark now” . We support this with a lot of interesting data from 4 Austronesian languages and Mandarin Chinese.
Click on the image below to read it:
