scholarly journals Nachzustand, Distanz und Aspektualität als Komponenten einer formfokussierten Steuerung von Perfekt und Präteritum

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Schumacher
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Focus On Form ◽  
Input Enhancement ◽  
Metalinguistic Feedback ◽  
L2 Instruction ◽  
Past Tenses ◽  
Form Approach

The fascinating complexity of the German past tenses has created many scientific contributions within the pedagogic, linguistic and SLA communities. Not often though the findings of the theoretical branches have been applied for pedagogic purposes. The article aims at bridging this gap by elaborating the semantic respectively pragmatic concepts of post-state, distance and aspect within a focus on form approach. The concepts of post-state and distance help to present systematically the different readings of the German present perfect and past tense. Reflections on aspectual meanings lead to insights into L2 decoding and coding preferences of learners whose L1 grammaticalises aspect. I propose several proactive and reactive focus on form activities (input flood, input enhancement, metalinguistic feedback, dictogloss) to increase the salience of the elaborated concepts within the L2 instruction of the German past tenses.

Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English

Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

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.

The Selectional Restrictions of French Past Tenses

2002 ◽  
Vol 47 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Marie Labelle
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
External Argument ◽  
Internal Argument ◽  
Selectional Restrictions ◽  
Tense Operators ◽  
Past Tenses

AbstractThis article argues against the idea that the Imparfait and the Passé Simple in French are aspectually sensitive tense operators. Both morphemes combine with any type of eventuality. It is not the case that a clause in the Imparfait denotes a state, or that a clause in the Passé Simple denotes an event. It is proposed that the Passé Simple is a true past tense, which introduces a past eventuality in the discourse with the condition that it be the maximal eventuality of the appropriate type. The Imparfait is analyzed as a dyadic morpheme, which selects an eventuality as internal argument and a past temporal referent of discourse as external argument, where the eventuality provides a condition on the temporal referent.

Temporal adverbials and the present perfect/past tense alternation

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentin Werner
Keyword(s):  
Cluster Analysis ◽  
Hierarchical Cluster Analysis ◽  
Hierarchical Cluster ◽  
Phylogenetic Networks ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Cultural Proximity ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
The Difference

Specification by certain temporal adverbials has been shown to be one of the typical triggers of the present perfect in British English. Often, however, L2 varieties display different patterns of temporal co-occurrence, especially using the simple past tense. This study is based on corpus data from twelve components of the International Corpus of English and analyzes the distribution between present perfect and past tense for a number of co-occurring temporal adverbials. In addition, it establishes three measures of similarity across the varieties (hierarchical cluster analysis, phylogenetic networks and a distribution-based measure). On the basis of 6 353 adverbials in total, this paper suggests (1) that there is a L1–L2 divide, (2) that the difference between “traditional” and “transplanted” L1 varieties is less pronounced, (3) that L2 varieties allow more variation, which indicates that in these varieties, the present perfect is partly used as a tense (sensu Quirk et al. 1985), and (4) that some temporal adverbials are less categorically attached to either present perfect or past tense than others. Finally, some conclusions with regard to the importance of geographical and socio-cultural proximity of certain varieties can be drawn.

De (on) Verklaarbaarheid Van Fossilisatie

1998 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 101-109
Author(s):  
Elisabeth van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Learning Process ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Advanced Learners ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
The Past ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Past Tenses ◽  
Different Levels

In the literature about fossilization, several definitions have been given and several explanations have been suggested for this phenomenon. I see fossilization as a long-time stagnation in the T2 learning process, leading to errors based on transfer. Fossilization is caused by sociolinguistic, pyscholinguistic and purely linguistic factors. In this paper I concentrate on the acquisition of syntactic structures and on the role of input and instruction in that process. I argue that, although in the acquisition of some syntactic structures, UG plays an important role, this does not account for the whole learning process: learners have not only to reset parameters when acquiring T2 but have to proceduralize knowledge based on the surface structure of sentences. In the case of the use of past tenses in French, many of the Dutch advanced learners of three different levels of proficiency do not acquire native-like intuitions about the use of these tenses, although input as well as instruction are thorough on this point. I suggest that the past tense system is not UG-dependent and that the instruction does not allow proceduralization of the knowledge.

How multiple past tenses divide the labor: The case of South Baffin Inuktitut

Linguistics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Midori Hayashi ◽  
David Y. Oshima
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Layered System ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linear Scheme ◽  
Temporal Specifications ◽  
Past Tenses ◽  
Common Perception ◽  
Masculine Gender

AbstractIt is a common perception that in languages having multiple past tenses with different remoteness specifications, the past tenses cover the entire past without a gap or overlap. This paper demonstrates that this way of looking at multiple-past tense systems is not appropriate for the system in South Baffin Inuktitut (a variety of the Inuit language). The dialect has at least four past tenses: recent, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal, and distant. We argue that the relation between the four tenses cannot be represented by a simple linear scheme for two reasons. First, the pre-hodiernal past has a special status as the “conventionally designated alternative”, which is chosen in cases of remoteness indeterminacy, analogous to, for example, the Russian masculine gender being used in cases of gender indeterminacy. Second, there is overlap in their coverage. The pre-hodiernal and hodiernal past tenses collectively cover the entire past and thus any past situation can be described with one of them. The other two provide means to make more fine-grained and subjective temporal specifications. Comparison will be made between the system in South Baffin Inuktitut and those in some Bantoid languages which have been pointed out in the literature to have a comparable layered system of tenses.

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.

Does French have a relative past tense?

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael Salkie
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Full Account ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Past Tenses ◽  
Passe Compose

Some recent work on French tenses has proposed a new analysis of the difference between the imperfect and the passé simple/passé composé. The imperfect is said to be a relative or anaphoric tense, while the PS/PC are absolute or deictic tenses. A number of studies have argued against the more widely accepted analysis which sees the difference between these tenses in terms of aspect. This paper argues that the new analysis is fundamentally incorrect as an account of the meaning of the French past tenses, although it has brought to light a range of phenomena which need to be included in a full account of the behaviour of the tenses in discourse. I argue that an enriched version of the traditional analysis can account for all the relevant data.

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