Abbreviations and orthography 1 Thanks to Pamela Munro, Dominique Sportiche, Tim Stowell and Jie Zhang for providing data and/or helpful comments on this analysis. Special thanks to Edith Gem who provided all the Choctaw examples. Symbols in the orthography have their usual phonetic values, with the following exceptions: <sh> = [š], <ch> = [è], <lh> = [/ l ], and underlining represents nasalization. The following abbreviations are used: ac=accusative, comp=complementizer, con=constrastive, d:ac = demonstrative accusative, d:nm = demonstrative nominative, dpast=distant past, ds=different subject, foc=focus, hn=hn-grade (iterative aspect), irr=irrealis, l=l-grade (a stem form that appears before some suffixes), loc=locative, n=n-grade (durative aspect), nm=nominative, part=participle, pl=plural, prev=previous mention, pt=past, super=superessive, ss=same subject, term = terminative, tns=tense. There are three sets of Choctaw person-number agreement markers, labelled I (approximately ‘Actor’), II (approximately ‘Patient’), and III (approximately ‘Goal/source’). Person markers are glossed as follows 1sI = 1 person singular, I agreement class; 2pI = 2 person st nd plural, II agreement class, etc. 1 George Aaron Broadwell University at Albany, SUNY Gerhard Brugger UCLA/University of Vienna On the Scope of the Imperfective Aspect: Variability in Choctaw Tense 1 1 Introduction Choctaw is a Muskogean language spoken in Mississippi and Oklahoma. It is an SOV language which allows both null subjects and objects, as shown in (1) and (2). 1) John-at sholosh chopa-tok. John-NM shoes buy-PAST ‘John bought shoes.’