Grammatical aspect informs us about the internal temporal contours of a situa tion. In other words, aspect provides information as to how the verbal action is to be regarded, whether it is complete, continuous, or iterative. Bosnian grammati calizes the binary system characteristic of Slavic languages that entails that verbs are marked for the perfective or the imperfective aspect. English, on the other hand, grammaticalizes the perfect and the progressive, which do not entirely cor respond to the perfective/imperfective aspectual opposition. Grammatical aspect is an obligatory category in Bosnian, whilst in English, verbs need not be mor phologically marked for aspect. Expectedly, studies report different processing patterns in sentences with aspectual violations in these two languages. It has been shown that native speakers of English do not show electrophysiological responses to violations of aspect, while native speakers of Bosnian show a clear sensitivity to aspectual violations immediately at the verb. Even though they detect aspectual violations already at the point of the verb in Bosnian, their L1, in this study we investigate whether university students of English process aspectual violations in English, their L2. More precisely, we conducted a self-paced reading study to ex plore whether Bosnian university students of English detect aspectual violations at the position of the verb or in adjacent positions during incremental sentence processing. Our results are in line with the previous findings on L1 processing of English aspect – English aspectual violations are not detected online during sen tence comprehension in L2 processing. However, there is an important difference. Unlike native speakers of English, Bosnian university students of English do not detect aspectual violations even after the sentence has been processed. Such re sults provide evidence for the Shallow Structure Hypothesis in L2 processing. We, therefore, compare our findings with other studies on grammatical aspect, con trast L1 and L2 processing, and discuss English and Bosnian grammatical aspect.

In this article, we claim that syntactic objects undergoing ellipsis can be targeted by both narrow syntactic and PF operations. We base this conclusion on experimental evidence from the interaction between single conjunct agreement and verb-echo answers in South Slavic, which we show to be derived via verb-stranding VP ellipsis. Adopting the view that Vocabulary Insertion replaces Q-variables on lexical heads (Halle 1991) and ellipsis is a syntactic operation which deletes Q-variables (Saab 2022), we demonstrate that constituents properly included in the ellipsis site can undergo Internal Merge in the narrow syntax, and can participate in PF processes from the derived position. The interaction between ellipsis, Internal Merge and Agree-Copy that accounts for these patterns of data follows naturally within the Distributed Ellipsis approach.

Even though a verb can assign a variety of thematic roles to the subject, the most typical role for a subject is that of an agent or that of an experiencer for verbs of perception and mental inference. In this paper, we describe constructions where verbs that typically select agent or experiencer subjects occur with subjects expressing thematic roles typical of adverbials: instrument, time or place. We refer to those subjects as permissive subjects. On the other hand, it is argued that in South Slavic languages, non-agents (and non-experiencers) do not show such a strong tendency to occur in the subject position. We performed a translation task to answer the following research question: What range of structures occur in Bosnian translation equivalents of the following English constructions with permissive subjects: Period sees, Money buys, Object seats number, Object sleeps number, Book/ Album/Record sells copies? The quantitative analysis showed that some of the most frequent translation strategies include the following: middle constructions, passive constructions and constructions where the English permissive subject becomes an adverbial in the Bosnian translation equivalent. Moreover, translation equivalents where the English permissive subject is translated as a Bosnian non-agentive/ permissive subject are rather frequent too. Nevertheless, our qualitative analysis shows that the choice of a translation equivalent for the target construction depends on the English target construction itself. For example, in the case of some combinations, we show a correlation between the thematic meaning of a particular permissive subject in English and the choice of a translation equivalent.