مطالب

This paper attempts to introduce the dimensions of bi/multi-lingualism as a cognitive linguis-tic phenomenon, which can be thought over in sociological, biolinguistic, cultural and psy-cholinguistic perspective. The main research question being asked as how bi/multilingualism is a cognitive phenomenon and what are the bilinguality problems and how do they repre-sents in linguistics? Linguistic interference, bilingual acquisition, and mental lexicons notions and multi lingual representation in the brain are the main problems of the subject. There are, at least, two dif-ferent types of linguistic transfer, positive and negative or interference. The mental lexicon is the constituent of the grammar consisting of phonological, morphological, semantic, syntac-tic, and pragmatics information which speakers have stored about individual words and morphemes in their minds.The paper, therefore, is an attempt to answer and deschibe the above questions.

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.