scholarly journals When-questions and tense in Inquisitive Semantics

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Jos Tellings
Keyword(s):  
Present Perfect ◽  
Inquisitive Semantics ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
Semantics Of Questions ◽  
Present Tense

Temporal questions with when and their counterparts in other languages display tense restrictions: they are incompatible with the present tense that is interpreted as 'currently ongoing', and English when-questions are incompatible with the present perfect. The existence of tense restrictions is one of the reasons why a theory of the semantics of questions should include an account of tense and aspect. I first propose an explanation of the tense restrictions based on the pragmatics of questions and partial answers. Then, I discuss how tense and aspectual operators can be added to Inquisitive Semantics (Ciardelli, Groenendijk & Roelofsen 2018).

scholarly journals A STUDY OF TENSES USED IN ENGLISH ONLINE NEWS WEBSITE

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 248-258
Author(s):  
Jittra Muta ◽  
Nutprapha Dennis
Keyword(s):  
Online News ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Breaking News ◽  
Research Instrument ◽  
News Website ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Data Collections

The purposes of this study were to analyze and describe English tenses used in an online news website and to examine which types of English tenses are frequently used in an online news website. The material in this study was 20 news in Mini-Lessons from B r e a k I n g N e w s E n g l i s h .c o m. The research instrument was a checklist which determines and categorizes English tenses as past tense, present tense, and future tense. The data collections were analyzed with the frequency and percentage. The research findings of the study showed that all using of English tenses in the 20 news from the Mini-Lessons were 279 sentences; past tense were 155 sentences (56%), present tense were 120 sentences (43%), and future tense were 4 sentences (1%). The most English tenses aspect of the news were past simple tense and present tense; past simple tense, present simple tense, present perfect tense, and present progressive tense, respectively. In contrast, breaking news used the least English tenses aspect of the news was past perfect tense, future simple tense, past progressive tense, present perfect progressive tense, and future perfect tense, while there were no used past perfect progressive tense, future progressive tense, future perfect tense, and future perfect progressive tense in the 20 selected breaking news.

Zero verb marking in Sranan

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid De Wit ◽  
Frank Brisard
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Perfective Aspect ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
Lexical Aspect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Basic Level

In the Surinamese creole language Sranan, verbs in finite clauses that lack overt TMA-marking are often considered to be ambiguous between past and present interpretations (depending on the lexical aspect of the verb involved) or analyzed as having a perfective value. We claim that these verbs are in fact zero-marked, and we investigate the various uses of this zero expression in relation to context and lexical aspect on the basis of corpus data and native speaker elicitations. It is shown that existing analyses do not cover and unify all the various uses of the construction. We propose, as an alternative, to regard the zero form as present perfective marker, whereby tense and aspect are conceived of as fundamentally epistemic categories, in line with Langacker (1991). This combination of present tense and perfective aspect, which is regarded as infelicitous in typological studies of tense and aspect (cf. the ‘present perfective paradox’, Malchukov 2009), gives rise to the various interpretations associated with zero. However, in all of its uses, zero still indicates that, at the most basic level, a situation belongs to the speaker’s conception of ‘immediate reality’ (her domain of ‘inclusion’). This basic ‘presentness’ distinguishes zero from the past-tense marker ben, which implies dissociation.

scholarly journals Interlanguage: A Case Study of English Narrative Discourse of an Indonesian Studying in the U.S.

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Stefanus Angga B. Prima
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Oral Narrative ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
English Speaker ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
The U.S

The aim of this study is to see how an Indonesian studying in the U.S. uses English tense and aspects to produce meaning oral narrative discourses. The Indonesian’s verbatim of narrative discourse is compared to that of a Minnesota-born English speaker studying in a university in the midwestern of the United States. The audio-recorded narrative discourses are transcribed, then foregrounding and backgrounding clauses of each participant’s oral narrative discourse are analyzed to count the number of verbs produced by each participant. The verbs are categorized into past verbs (simple, progressive, pluperfect) and non-past verbs (base forms, present tense, present progressive, present perfect). By analyzing the morphology distribution, the researcher recorded that the Minnesotan participant used past tense more frequently in foregrounding and backgrounding clauses in both narrative tasks, while the Indonesian used more temporal adverbs than that of the Minnesotan.

scholarly journals Cross-linguistic variation and the present perfect : the case of Portuguese

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 68-99
Author(s):  
Cristina Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Selectional Restrictions ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Curious Property

The Present Perfect in Portuguese has the curious property of forcing iteration of the eventuality described. This paper proposes an account of the iterativity in terms of selectional restrictions of the Present Tense and independent properties of the Perfect and argues against the account of Giorgi and Pianesi 1998 in which the Portuguese Present Perfect is treated as containing two main verbs.  

scholarly journals present perfect at the semantics/pragmatics interface: American English and Brazilian Portuguese

2006 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-250
Author(s):  
Karina Veronica Molsing
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Tense And Aspect

Modern theorists rarely agree on how to represent the categories of tense and aspect, making a consistent analysis for phenomena, such as the present perfect, more difficult to attain. It has been argued in previous analyses that the variable behavior of the present perfect between languages licenses independently motivated treatments, particularly of a morphosyntactic or semanticsyntactic nature (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997; Schmitt 2001; Ilari 2001). More specifically, the wellknown readings of the American English (AE) present perfect (resultative, experiential, persistent situation, recent past (Comrie 1976)), are at odds with the readings of the corresponding structure in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the 'pretérito perfeito composto' (default iterativity and occasional duration (Ilari 1999)). Despite these variations, the present work, assuming a tense-aspect framework at the semantic-pragmatic interface, will provide a unified analysis for the present perfect in AE and BP, which have traditionally been treated as semantically divergent. The present perfect meaning, in conjunction with the aspectual class of the predicate, can account for the major differences between languages, particularly regarding iterativity and the "present perfect puzzle", regarding adverb compatibility.  

scholarly journals To We or Not to We: Corpus-Based Research on First-Person Pronoun Use in Abstracts and Conclusions

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 215824402110088
Author(s):  
Shih-ping Wang ◽  
Wen-Ta Tseng ◽  
Robert Johanson
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
First Person ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Integrated Framework ◽  
Person Pronoun ◽  
Pronoun Use ◽  
Present Tense

A growing trend exists for authors to employ a more informal writing style that uses “we” in academic writing to acknowledge one’s stance and engagement. However, few studies have compared the ways in which the first-person pronoun “we” is used in the abstracts and conclusions of empirical papers. To address this lacuna in the literature, this study conducted a systematic corpus analysis of the use of “we” in the abstracts and conclusions of 400 articles collected from eight leading electrical and electronic (EE) engineering journals. The abstracts and conclusions were extracted to form two subcorpora, and an integrated framework was applied to analyze and seek to explain how we-clusters and we-collocations were employed. Results revealed whether authors’ use of first-person pronouns partially depends on a journal policy. The trend of using “we” showed that a yearly increase occurred in the frequency of “we” in EE journal papers, as well as the existence of three “we-use” types in the article conclusions and abstracts: exclusive, inclusive, and ambiguous. Other possible “we-use” alternatives such as “I” and other personal pronouns were used very rarely—if at all—in either section. These findings also suggest that the present tense was used more in article abstracts, but the present perfect tense was the most preferred tense in article conclusions. Both research and pedagogical implications are proffered and critically discussed.

scholarly journals Acquisition of English Tense and Aspect Translation Competence by Behdini Students: An Experimental Study

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shivan Toma ◽  
Mahdi Saddiq
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
English Language ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
Test Items ◽  
Mixed Effects Modeling ◽  
Parameter Resetting ◽  
Syntactic Differences ◽  
Complete Translation

This study is an attempt to investigate the acquisition of translation competence of the English tense and aspect system by Behdini learners who are students at the Translation Department at the College of Languages in the University of Duhok. This paper is an experimental study that adopts the Translation Competence Acquisition model. There are many morphological and syntactic differences between English and Behdini tense and aspect and there are differences in terms of the usage of the tense and aspect between the two mentioned languages too. A Judgement Elicitation Task is employed as a tool to collect data in this study. 4o English sentences with their translations into Behdini are included in this task. Behdini learners are asked to make their judgements on each translated sentence. These test items are a mixture of four tenses: present continuous, present perfect, past continuous, and past perfect. Two subgroups of learners are involved in this study: the senior subgroup and the fresher subgroup in an attempt to investigate the effect of participants’ English language level and proficiency. Mixed-effects modeling has been used for analysing the data statistically. The lmer package (version is 3.3.1) has been employed with logit link function and binomial variance for the judgement data in R, which is an open-source language and environment for statistical computing. The main hypothesis of the study is that Behdini learners are not expected to attain a complete translation competence regarding the English tense and aspect system due to the differences between the two languages. The main results of the study show that while Behdini learners were able to attain a good translation competence in terms of accepting the grammatical translations, they failed to reject the ungrammatical translations. These findings implicate that Behdini learners’ acquisition of translation competence is not attained fully. It is also shown that Behdini students at lower proficiency levels employ their L1 grammar as the first stage of their translation process, but at later stages of proficiency parameter resetting becomes more possible.

scholarly journals THE USE OF PRESENT PERFECT IN THE EXPRESSION OF PAST TEMPORALITY IN L2 SPANISH AND CATALAN BY CHILDREN OF MOROCCAN ORIGIN

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
Eulàlia Canals
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Functional Feature ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
Story Retell ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Right

This study examines the acquisition of Catalan and Spanish past-tense verbs (Preterite, Present Perfect, and Imperfect) by children of Moroccan origin in three schools in the Barcelona metropo1itan area. It presents data that allow us to study which of the three tenses poses the most problems for the second language (L2) speakers as compared to the native speakers in a control group. The data were obtained using elicited story-retell tasks and oral narratives. The results show that in both languages acquiring the accurate functional use of verbs is more difficult than making the right lexical or morphological choices. The greatest functional difficulty lies in the acquisition of the Preterite vis-à-vis the Present Perfect. These results provide additional evidence that form precedes function. However, they challenge an established position on the acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages, which holds that the most difficult functional feature to acquire for L2 learners of these languages is the difference between perfective and imperfective tenses.

scholarly journals AN ANALYSIS OF TENSE AND ASPECT IN THE “TANGLED” MOVIE SCRIPT

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 187
Author(s):  
Isti Endila Herani ◽  
Cynantia Rachmijati
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
Descriptive Research ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Movie Script ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

This study is an attempt to analyze the tense and aspects found inside the ”Tangled” movie script. The data source is a sentence or speech the verb contains tense and aspects found on “Tangled” movie script. The study applied descriptive qualitative method.This study belongs to a descriptive research because it collects and analyzes the data, after that draws a conclusion based on the data. Then this research belongs to qualitative research because it involves analyzing and explaining the data. Additionally, this research is designed in descriptive qualitative research because the research examines the types of the language used of Tense and Aspects in "Tangled" Movie Scripts. In this research the data source is “Tangled” Movie Script.In “Tangled” movie script, there was 61 sentences that researcher found in the uses of tense and aspect. From the result above the dominant types on tense and aspect in “Tangled” movie script was simple future and present perfect. In the “Tangled” movie script the researcher didn’t find tense and aspect in past perfect progressive, future progressive, future perfect and future perfect progressive. 

Perfect and pluperfect: what is the relationship?

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael Salkie
Keyword(s):  
Present Perfect ◽  
Tense And Aspect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theoretical Literature ◽  
The Relationship

The English (present) perfect (e.g. I have gone) has been extensively studied in the theoretical literature on tense and aspect. The pluperfect (I had gone) has by contrast received relatively little attention, and the relationship between the present perfect and the pluperfect has been virtually ignored. Descriptive grammars of English also tend to say little about the latter two issues, beyond distinguishing cases such as (1)–(6), where the pluperfect seems to be the ‘past of the perfect’, from instances like (7)–(11), where the pluperfect is the ‘past of the past’ (cf. Thomson & Martinet, 1969: 112–13; Berland-Delépine, 1971: 95–6; Guitard, 1966: 206–7; Palmer, 1974: 54):

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