The evolution of the “hot news” perfect in English

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contextual Influence ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
English Verb

This paper deals with the “hot news” use of the English present perfect. Previous research has suggested that this use marks the end point of the perfect category, paving the way for further grammaticalisation to a perfective or past tense. To examine its historical development in Modern English, verb forms in the leads of hard news reports in the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald were examined, with comparison made between two time periods, 1851–1900 and 1951–2000. Attention was given to contextual influence on the choice between the present perfect and the past tense for expressing hot news meanings. The quantitative findings show that the hot news perfect has not taken over the ground of other tense forms, but has become increasingly associated with unspecified, recent past time. The evolution of the English present perfect in general is characterised by register-mediated functional specialisation.

scholarly journals Verb Form and Tense in Arabic

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 284
Author(s):  
Yasir Alotaibi
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Imperfective Aspect ◽  
Neutral Context ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
English Verb ◽  
Modern Standard

This paper discusses tense in Arabic based on three varieties of the language: Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and the Taif dialect (TD). We argue against previous analyses that suggest that Arabic is a tenseless language, which assume that tense information is derived from the context. We also argue against the suggestion that Arabic is tensed, but that its tense is relative, rather than absolute. We propose here that CA, MSA, and TD have closely related verb forms, and that these are tensed verbs. Tense in Arabic is absolute in a neutral context and verb forms take the perfective and imperfective aspect. Similar to other languages including English, verb forms in Arabic may take reference from the context instead of the present moment. In this case, we argue that this does not mean that tense in Arabic is relative, because this would also imply that tense in many languages, including English, is relative. Further, we argue that the perfective form indicates only the past tense and the imperfective form, only the present; all other interpretations are derived by implicature.

scholarly journals Crimean Tatar Future-Past Tense Ending in -джакъ эди Contrasted With English Verb Forms

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
E.V. Shved
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Crimean Tatar ◽  
English Verb

The article researches the semantic meanings of the Crimean Tatar Future-Past Tense ending in джакъ эди, as well as determines the English language verb forms that carry equivalent meanings. The research is based on the analysis of literature written by seventy-five Crimean Tatar authors. The research allows to make a conclusion that the tense ending in -джакъ эди has three main semantic meanings: unrealized intent, relaying of information about a past intention without clarifying whether it was completed, past agreement or plan to carry out an action, and also a separate case involving the construction with аз къалды. It is determined, that similar meanings are carried respectively by the English constructions of Future Perfect in the Past, constructions with was/were going to with an infinitive, constructions with Future Indefinite in the Past, and also constructions with was/were about to with an infinitive, as well as constructions involving Past Simple Tense together with the words almost and barely.

Preverbation and narrativity in Lithuanian. The distribution of finite simplex and compound verbs in narrative main clauses

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Text ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Compound Verbs ◽  
Finite Verb

The article deals with the use of simplex and compound (prefixed) verbs in narrative text. Main clauses comprising finite verb forms in the past and in the past habitual tense are examined in an attempt to establish to what extent simplex and compound verbs exhibit aspect oppositions, and whether a correlation exists between the occurrence of simplex vs. compound verbs and distinct textual units. The investigation shows that although simple and compound verbs in Lithuanian are not in direct aspect opposition to each other, in the background text portions most of the verbs are prefixless past tense forms or habitual forms, whereas in the plot-advancing text portions, the vast majority of verbs are compound verbs in the simple past tense.  

scholarly journals “The Trout Breaks the Ice” by Mikhail Kuzmin: Verse and Grammar

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Marina Akimova
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Complex Composition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Compositional Structure ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Astronomical Time ◽  
Mikhail Kuzmin ◽  
Iambic Pentameter ◽  
Finite Verb

The author explores various compositional levels of the Russian modernist author Mikhail Kuzmin’s long poem “The Trout Breaks the Ice”. The levels are: (1) the grammatical tenses vs. the astronomical time (non-finite verb forms (imperative) are also assumed to indicate time); (2) the meters of this polymetric poem; (3) realistic vs. symbolic and (4) static vs. dynamic narrative modes. The analysis is done by the chapter, and the data are summarized in five tables. It turned out that certain features regularly co-occur, thus supporting the complex composition of the poem. In particular, the present tense and time regularly mark the realistic and static chapters written in various meters, whereas the past tense and time are specific to the realistic and dynamic chapters written in iambic pentameter. The article sheds new light on the compositional structure of Kuzmin’s poem and the general principles of poetic composition.

Global Warming as a Socioscientific Controversy

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Craig O. Stewart ◽  
Claire Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Policy Responses

Socioscientific controversies are “extended argumentative engagements over socially significant issues … comprising communicative events and practices in and from both scientific and nonscientific spheres” (Stewart, 2009, p. 125). While global warming is not controversial among the vast majority of climate scientists, socioscientific controversies over global warming abound in various media, as citizens, politicians, journalists, and others discuss and weigh the scientific evidence for and appropriate policy responses to global warming. In this chapter, the authors investigate the lexical choices used in the New York Times in straight news articles reporting on controversies about global warming from 2001-2006, as partisan differences on this issue became more pronounced. Specifically, using DICTION 5.0, the authors analyze 87 news reports, comparing those focused on science issues with those focused on policy issues. These statistical lexical comparisons are supplemented with qualitative discourse analyses.

scholarly journals The Golok Dialect and Written Tibetan past-tense verb forms

1979 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. K. Sprigg
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Present Tense

Tibetan orthography looks phonetically challenging, to say the least; and one may well wonder whether such tongue-twisting combinations as the brj of brjes, the blt- of bltas, or the bst- of bstan ever did twist a Tibetan tongue, or whether the significance of these and other such orthographic forms might not have been morphophonemic in origin, with the letters r, l, and s in the syllable initial of forms such as these serving to associate these past-tense forms lexically with their corresponding present-tense forms; e.g. Viewed in relation to Tibetan orthography the past-tense forms of a class of verbs in the Golok dialect seem to support this hypothesis. Table 1, below, contains a number of examples of Golok verbs in their past-tense and present-tense forms to illustrate a type of phonological analysis suited to that view of the r syllable-initial unit in the Golok examples, and, indirectly, in the WT examples too (the symbols b and b will be accounted for in section (B) below).

scholarly journals Imagining big data: Illustrations of “big data” in US news articles, 2010–2016

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Pentzold ◽  
Cornelia Brantner ◽  
Lena Fölsche
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Big Data ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Washington Post ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The People ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
Abstract Data

Imagining “big data” brings up a palette of concerns about their technological intricacies, political significance, commercial value, and cultural impact. We look at this emerging arena of public sense-making and consider the spectrum of press illustrations that are employed to show what big data are and what their consequences could be. We collected all images from big data-related articles published in the online editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post. As the first examination of the visual dimension of big data news reports to date, our study suggests that big data are predominantly illustrated with reference to their areas of application and the people and materials involved in data analytics. As such, they provide concrete physical form to abstract data. Rather than conceiving of potential ramifications that are more or less likely to materialize, the dominant mode of illustration draws on existing, though often trite, visual evidence.

A contrastive look at the present perfect/preterite opposition in English and Norwegian

2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Elsness
Keyword(s):  
Zero Point ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Past Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
The Difference

This article deals with the opposition between the present perfect and the preterite in English and Norwegian from a contrastive point of view. The use of these verb forms is very similar in the two languages, and markedly different from that in closely related languages such as German and French, where the present perfect is used much more widely. In English and Norwegian the preterite is the norm if the reference is identified as being to past time which is clearly separate from the deictic zero-point, for instance through adverbial specification, while the present perfect is used of situations extending from the past all the way up to the deictic zero-point, and of situations located within such a time span. In many intermediate cases, where the reference is to a loosely defined past time, either verb form may be used in both languages, although several writers have claimed that the present perfect is more common in Norwegian than in English in such cases. The difference between the two languages is more distinct if the reference is to what can be seen as unique past time, in which case the present perfect is usually blocked in English but very common in Norwegian. Also, the so-called inferential perfect in Norwegian is not matched by any similar perfect use in English. These claims are amply confirmed by an investigation of the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), where the present perfect is more frequent in the Norwegian as compared with the English sections, at the expense of the preterite. Moreover, there is found to be a marked difference between the original and the translated texts of the ENPC: the ratio between the present perfect and the preterite is generally higher in Norwegian than in English but not quite so high in Norwegian texts translated from English as in Norwegian original texts, and somewhat higher in English texts translated from Norwegian than in English original texts. This difference is ascribed to interference from the source language in the translated texts.

Regional variation in the English verb qualifier system

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Regional Variation ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Standard Language ◽  
The Past ◽  
Redundant Data ◽  
Irregular Verbs ◽  
Past Tenses ◽  
English Verb

Nonstandard dialects often use the same form for the past tense and past participle of irregular verbs for which the standard language has distinct forms. One possible reason would be that some speakers have a nonstandard system of verb qualifiers (tense, mood, and aspect markers) in which the past tense/past participle distinction is functionally redundant. Data on spontaneous speech in Britain in the 1990s partly supports this by showing marked regional variation in the use of the Perfect construction. However, some nonstandard past tenses cannot be explained in terms of a nonstandard qualifier system.

scholarly journals Obligatory Movement Operations for Verbal Roots in Najdi Arabic

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Al Qahtani Khulud ◽  
Al Zahrani Mohammad
Keyword(s):  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Najdi Arabic

This paper focuses on the obligatory movement operations that Najdi Arabic (NA) verb forms must undergo to satisfy the morphosyntactic requirements within the minimalist program (MP). Recall that the practice of the MP syntactic theory, including its further advancements, proposed by Chomsky (1995, 2000, 2001) springs from the fact that the grammar of a language starts basically from the lexicon from which suitable words are selected to form clauses. The selected words undergo some syntactic operations such as Merge, by which larger constituents are formed, and Move, by which the formed constituents move to higher positions in the hierarchy to fulfil some specific syntactic purposes. When the elements have undergone the operations of Merge and Move they are spelled out into phonetic forms (PF) and logical forms (LF). In light of this, we argue that NA verbs start out as roots in the head of VP before merging with the vocalic affixes in the head of Tax-AspP to satisfy the subjectverb agreement requirements and mark the aspect features. Perfective verb forms must then continue to move to T to merge with the past tense abstract features while imperfective forms stay in Tax-AspP. The thematic subject is generated in Spec,VP; it may stay there to derive the VSO order, or move higher to derive the SVO order. The findings show that obligatory movements indicate interactions between the functional categories of TP, Tax-AspP and VP: NA verbal roots obligatorily move to Tax-Asp to derive (im)perfective forms; perfectives obligatorily move to T.

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